One place where I've seen this technique is a ORM package on CPAN - Class::Tables - which auto-generates classes from table names and makes colum names into their methods using AUTOLOAD:

sub AUTOLOAD {
    my $self = shift;
    (my $func = $Class::Tables::AUTOLOAD) =~ s/.*:://;
    
    croak qq{Can't locate object method "$func" via package "$self"}
        unless ref $self and UNIVERSAL::isa( $self, "Class::Tables" );

    unshift @_, $self, $func;
    goto &field;
}
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The field() sub translates its arguments to the appropriate SQL call against the database. I've used that package very much, and I have seen no adverse side effects. And no, I'm not aware of a cleaner way to do this.

I'm still puzzled by the meaning of "AUTOLOAD is localized to a blocks context" part of your question. Does that mean having different lookup-results (depending on scope) for the last-resort AUTOLOAD sub?

Sorry if I'm just being too dumb or having the wrong kind of humour. ;)