I never used Dist::Zilla because I feel it incorporates too much of the wrong kind of magic. But my general impression is that it seems to be mostly for building a distribution, not for actually installing modules, which is supposedly still done through Module::Build or ExtUtils::MakeMaker.

With that said, how did you run the install and what was the output? I assume that you made sure that the correct version of Perl was run by both, the module installer and your test program? Maybe Dist::Zilla picked up /usr/bin/perl while your preferred Perl seems to be something else?