I see a lot of messages from recent versions of Perl about code that is "no longer allowed" and "forbidden" and even "illegal"! The code police have made easy things impossible.

I dunno about that, deprecations are usually made with a good amount of consideration, watching all of CPAN for breakage (as in this case) as a canary for how Perl is used by devs in production, and there is usually a workaround or fix possible for code that is affected by this. Personally, I don't remember really being affected by any surprising deprecations. So I'd be curious what problems specifically you've run into.

As I said, in this case, I doubt that this module was ever supposed to work with plain function calls, and only methods. If you look at the really early and unreleased version of the module, that's all it supported. And the tests specifically test for the failure of a function call.

If you guys can't figure this out my chances are slim

There are probably some hacks that would make it possible, but I think chances are that they'd be pretty ugly hacks. Note that using UNIVERSAL::AUTOLOAD is not so great to begin with - anything that installs things into UNIVERSAL risks having other modules break in mysterious ways.