G'day redsox43,

Welcome to the Monastery.

I used macOS (formerly Mac OS X) for many years. I stopped using it a little over a year ago. While I can provide some advice, I'm not in a position to test anything for you (including anything related to your current problem). Also, be aware that any advice runs the risk of being a little out of date.

"Other posts where I should run Strawberry Perl instead, and leave the Perl that came with the OS alone, but I wanted to ask if anyone had any thoughts before I started down that path."

Firstly, Strawberry Perl is, as its home page states, "a perl environment for MS Windows"; so you can forget about using that with an Apple Mac environment.

Apple have indicated that they are dropping default support for Perl: see the Scripting Language Runtimes section (it's roughly in the middle of that rather long page) of "macOS Catalina 10.15 Release Notes" were I first noted that information. You might want to follow various links in "macOS Release Notes" for more up to date information. I had a very quick look but couldn't immediately find anything of specific relevance to Perl.

In the main, not using a system Perl is generally a very good move and recommended by most. I recommend using Perlbrew; however, there are other options which you may want to investigate. I wrote a fair amount about this in "Re: Understanding Perl / Brew Perl and Cpan on macOS"; including why not to use the system Perl.

Many people here use Perlbrew. If you choose that option, there's plenty here who can provide help and advice if you run into difficulties. That's not to say that similar help and advice won't be forthcoming if you choose a different option: I'm just not familiar with those other options.

So, given all of that, I'd suggest you get "started down that path" sooner rather than later.