From there I am manually copying

Those weren't the instructions you were given. You asked how to pass custom options (noxs) to Makefile.PL, so you were told to use

cpanm --look Date::Simple
perl Makefile.PL noxs
make
make test
make install
[download]

This is basically exactly what cpanm Date::Simple does, except it passes noxs to Makefile.PL.

That wouldn't work here -- noxs is specific to Date::Simple -- but the point is you weren't told to avoid the installer (by that post), and it shouldn't be surprising that doing so can lead to problems.