It seems the change in rand was merely that of bringing Windows into line with nix -

That's cool. (Though personally I think I would have preferred they'd used the 64-bit Mersenne Twister algorithm everywhere. )

I still raise my eyebrows at the srand documentation I quoted earlier - the "predictable behaviour" mentioned there might still apply to nix across modern versions of perl, but that is not so for Windows (and some other systems, no doubt). If it says that srand($seed) produces "predictable behaviour", with no caveats, then I think people are entitled to think that the behaviour will be predictable.

Agreed.