I am finding Unicode support in Perl hard. Most of my strings are ASCII, so there usually is no trouble. But then a Unicode character comes up, and suddenly writing text to stdout produces garbage characters and Perl issues a warning about it.

You are probably outputing decoded text (i.e. Unicode Code Points) to a file handle expecting encoded text (e.g. UTF-8). You can cause the encoding to happen automatically using

use open ':std', ':encoding(UTF-8)';
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