IMO, there's a difference between POD not following best practices of warnings and strict, and POD that encourages the use of indirect object notation which is actively discouraged in official documentation.

I agree entirely. Most code samples I see in POD are not presented as complete, runnable scripts. This is fine but it is necessary for the reader to understand it and realise that not all the code is necessarily present, including strictures.

Conversely if there is some deprecated practice actually evident in the code sample as written, then that's a different matter.

It might be useful to have a way to use Perl::Critic on the snippets within POD in order to catch some of these but I am not aware of a trivial method for doing so.