The simple rule to remember, if you want to match a literal { character (U+007B LEFT CURLY BRACKET) in a regular expression pattern, is to escape each literal instance of it in some way. Generally easiest is to precede it with a backslash, like \{ or enclose it in square brackets ({).
There's a lot of disambiguation to do along these lines, and your response helped me piece this all together. I finally found the syntax I was looking for in the REPL:
DB<7> $b="\N{U+007B}"
+
DB<8> p $b
+
{
DB<9>
In general, when upgrading Perl versions, two things are important: have a test environment where you can try out upgrading Perl before doing it in a live environment, and second, upgrade Perl releases step by step, i.e. 5.10, 5.12, 5.14, and so on (e.g. perlbrew makes this easy), because as you can tell from the above, the policy is to have breaking changes give deprecation warnings for at least one major release before making them fatal. (Update: Side note: 5.10.1 to 5.26.3 is a jump of over 9 years of development, with 5.26.3 still being 3.5 years older than the current 5.36.0.)
Are you suggesting that a person sandbox the application and boil the perl version up?