Closing the context menu is fundamentally a terrible user experience design – how would you get it back? The whole point of the context menu is that it's automatically available when you might need it and impossible to get rid of until you change the selection. Or are you suggesting we change the selection when you press "Escape"? Isn't that even more confusing?

I think that the distinction you draw between context menus, inspectors, and dialogs is lost on users. As far as normal people are concered, these are all dialogs, and Escape should close them all. If you want it back, then you click on it again, just like you would get any other inspector-dialog-thingy back after you closed it.

However, if you'll stop Escape from exiting without saving when a context menu is open, then I'll compromise on letting you make it impossible to get rid of the context menu. (I agree that changing the selection could be confusing in some circumstances.)

We added the ability to "dismiss" contexts on mobile during our work on the mobile link inspector.

I don't see any harm in doing something like this, the first press would give a clear visual feedback by hiding the context, so if the user wants to close the editor they can press escape again.

FWIW Google Docs behave similarly to what @Whatamidoing-WMF describes.

how would you get it back?

I think the same way as in GDocs, the current context would be reset to as if you cursor was in plaint text, so any cursor movement would result in a context change and the context re-appearing.

Change 805812 had a related patch set uploaded (by Esanders; author: Esanders):

[VisualEditor/VisualEditor@master] Surface cancel: Hide context before closing surface

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/805812

Change 805812 merged by jenkins-bot:

[VisualEditor/VisualEditor@master] Surface cancel: Hide context before closing surface

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/805812

Change 805895 had a related patch set uploaded (by Bartosz Dziewoński; author: Bartosz Dziewoński):

[mediawiki/extensions/VisualEditor@master] Update VE core submodule to master (1a871fab5)

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/805895

Change 805895 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/VisualEditor@master] Update VE core submodule to master (1a871fab5)

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/805895