Originally Posted by
portmanteau
Using the correct phrases is paramount in ATC and dare I say it on the flight deck as well.
VFR refers to the rules of flight and VMC refers to the the weather conditions. There is no chance that one "may mean" the other. That's a red herring you are introducing.
It's not far off the question to propose such an error. ATC is in a non native language, stressful moment... Besides I've seen it being used that way in the aforementioned conditions. Plus I don't see any reason why to ask such a thing at that time.
As someone mentioned earlier, it would be interesting to see what happened with the first approach and why they seem to take a circle to land/visual traffic without telling anyone, as that would seem to be a key moment, everything else after that is just a cascading mess