A way to launch new coroutines inside a coroutine, without creating a new scope (i.e. using the current coroutine's scope), seems to be

CoroutineScope(coroutineContext).launch {...}

. 1) Is there a better way? 2) Is this a bad practice?

It is a bad practice. When you do this, what scope you expect this coroutine to run it? You don’t have any control on the scope in this code. It can be a scope of some long-running actor or a scope of some short-living function. If you truly don’t care, then just use

GlobalScope.launch

. However, much better and recommended approach is to actually think about that, figure out what scope in your application naturally controls your coroutine and explicitly use that scope.