Thank you both, AnomalousMonk and Laurent_R.

You've made clear something that previous (careless?) readings of the docs left me in a blindspot in which I conflated 'quotemeta' (as a generic descriptor) with q, qq, qr.... instead of understanding that quotemeta() IS an operator in its own right.

So, FTR, both versions of this code produce identical output:

C:\> perl -E "my $str = qq(|g|h|i); my $strQ = qq(\Q|g|h|i\E); say quo
+temeta($str); say $strQ;"
\|g\|h\|i
\|g\|h\|i
[download]

P.S. Technically, this reply is directed to /me, but is done deliberately to acknowledge both previous replies and their authors.