Was Fatal too complicated, or something? After all, that's core now.

I've worked places where something like this was the preferred style. The argument went (and I think it's at least vaguely reasonable) that by using a different subroutine you could tell by looking at the code in question whether an exception would be thrown - rather than having to look at the top of the file for the use Fatal. It also had the advantage of breaking at runtime if you forgot to load the 'safe' module - whereas forgetting to load Fatal.pm meant the code continued to 'work'.