Generally, static methods ignore the first argument because they already know which class they are in. new() is implemented by almost all packages as a static method.

Yet, because of inheritance and possibility of being called on behalf of other package, well-behaving new() shouldn't ignore the first argument. In simplified case like this:

sub new {
  my ($class, %opts) = @_;
  my $self = { %opts };

  bless $self, $class;
}
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