It's a terrible hack.

I think that was my reaction, too.
The question is "Having worked in perl-5.32.x and earlier, should this hack be expected to continue working in 5.34.x and onwards ?"
I don't know the answer ... but maybe we should just work on rewriting t/01-basic.t such that the hack is not needed.

BTW, thanks for pointing out the part that File::Spec plays in this.

Cheers,
Rob