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> if someone else has been able to answer to the asker's satisfaction, it is patently false that the question is unclear.

That is actually a flawed premise.

The question "what is the price of bread in the bakery Good Bread?" question is missing details because it doesn't specify which bread nor it specifies the bakery unambiguously. Yet by chance someone could "understand" the asker's question by answering exactly as intended. That means the question was answered "correctly" by chance and not that it was clear.

Remember that one core principle of the open internet is that anyone can benefit from it. Here it is the same: Each question is answered not only for the asker, but for everyone with a similar question. The poorer scoped, the more useless it becomes.

Now, there is no easy solution for the closure problem, because there is no precise metric to verify whether a question is detailed enough, although we can usually agree on questions that are far from the imaginary boundary.

I think it makes sense to be conservative when in doubt and, when there is disagreement for a particular case, do as you did, raise the question in Meta and see what people think. It's bureaucratic indeed, but I think it is the best we have.

As a last note, often times moderators don't close a question single-handedly, many times a flag is raised by a normal user or they consult one another. This of course can vary from moderator to moderator.