Have you tried debugging it by giving it a non-existing script name as default_script?

Thanks for the suggestion. It dies with the same error if the file referenced by default_script exists or not!

Failed to find APPERL_DEFAULT_SCRIPT, is this an old APPerl binary? 
at /path/to/Perl/Dist/APPerl.pm line 1185.

There is an another possible issue (warning) in the build process after adding this line to apperl-project.json per the previous step in the tutorial:

"zip_extra_files" : { "bin" : ["src/hello"] }

These are the new output lines shown during the build process:

cd /path/to/apperl/hello/.apperl/o/my_nobuild_config/tmp/zip
zip -r /path/to/apperl/hello/.apperl/o/my_nobuild_config/tmp/perl.com lib bin
	zip warning: name not matched: lib
updating: bin/ (stored 0%)
  adding: bin/hello (deflated 1%)

However running "/perl.com /zip/bin/hello" after the build does work as advertised. I'll try hacking at APPerl.pm next but it's about 1500+ lines of dense code...