I understand what you're saying, in that you can run the function over code and render something which is not a minimum viable reproducible example. However, especially in GitHub issues (even more so when they're in ggplot2, or any visualization context) we really are asking users to use the package because of the image generation and uploading functionality. Obviously this is getting things down to semantics, but, given the level of confusion around these things, I think it's important to try to disambiguate without decoupling a term that's being intentionally used (i.e. there's a reason we introduced the vocabulary).
I think @jennybryan describes what you've outlined above really well in the community call (starts ~10:40).
And in the accompanying slide deck.
The scenarios in which you can successfully run reprex without throwing the desired error (bc reprexes can contain errors, in fact, we often request them so we can see exact context errors) is when:
- Someone is loading data through a local path.
- Someone is running reprex over a function definition, and excluding the problematic code.
- A bunch of other things, I'm sure…