But as I said I think putting the logic into a more elaborate xpath to do the heavy lifting inside the browser would fix your performance issue without needing HTML::Tree

IMHO your code will force the Perl part in W:M:C to do a lot of own filtering and create thousands of proxy objects. These Perl objects will also tunnel requests back and forth to the browser for most method calls.

Hence many potential bottlenecks.

update

as an illustration, this xpath in chrome's dev console for https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_article_depth returns 1016 strings at once

//table[3]//tr//td//text()

Disclaimer: I don't have W:M:C installed and my xpath foo is rusted, so I'm pretty sure there are even better ways to do it.