"As for unnecessary things like "= undef" and "close $fh" ..."

That's absolutely fine and your reasoning is sound. As I said: "I'm not saying don't use them: just advising that they're optional".

"I think that a programming language should stay language that we speak and understand, ..."

The first time I ever saw a Perl script — a very long time ago; I'm pretty sure it was Perl 3 — I was absolutely amazed that I was able to understand most of it at a glance.