Not really, I can't see this in the documentation.

And the author seems to be a bit confused about the inner mechanics of Perl.

update

After further reading. .. the issue seems to be that the ref returned is the one of an internal attribute _content , which "still" allows direct write access to children elements, but that's strongly discouraged.

But as long as you are only reading and not writing, I can't see a reason to deprecated the whole method.