socket.close() causes Bad Request in nginx logs

[SergeiFranco]

I was troubleshooting errant 400 bad requests in nginx logs caused by my micropython socket (not urequests) code.
The error looks like this:
192.168.1.254 - - [02/Apr/2023:12:15:04 +1200] "" 400 0 "-" "-"

The actual request worked fine with 200 OK, then immediately the line above appears in the nginx/access.log
I traced it to socket.close(), it seems that in micropython socket.close() sends EOF, which is a bad request form nginx point of view.

Is there anyway to shutdown the socket without sending EOF (there is no shutdown() method unlike in regular python, at least according to this https://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/library/socket.html) ?

Do I just not close the socket and call gc.collect() which theoretically will release the socket?