The scope of the post was variable naming. I used dates and "The Three Bears" for a light example of variable naming that almost anyone could understand. I did not even begin to address "better code". I'll save that for another (or hundreds of other) posts.

Your Mama Bear example is some seriously broken date iteration code (so you change lastDay from within doSomething?).

The code is fine. It only becomes "seriously broken" if you change the loop variable within the iteration, in which case you seriously broke it with poor practice.

The Baby Bear code's naming is a bit off too. Is it inclusive or exclusive?

The naming is fine. So is the code. Your question of inclusivity or exclusivity is meaningless without understanding the assignment of the iteration variables, which again, was outside the scope of the post.

The letter 'y' is obvious

No it's not obvious. That's the whole point. It's extremely poor practice (See Papa Bear example.) You cannot assume the poor sucker who maintains your code will know what "y" means. And Heaven help him if he tries to do a global search for that variable in 2,000 lines of code. Which may lead him to reuse it inside the iteration. Which is just about the only way to "seriously break" it as in your Mama Bear complaint.

Your revisions will cause exactly the problem I was demonstrating to avoid.