G'day Alexander,

"Having both allows to later change your mind and support older Perl versions ... Removing use v5.36 would implicitly disable strict otherwise."

In the dim, distant past I made a similar comment regarding code I'd posted which included some equivalent redundancy (although I don't recall details now); on that basis, I've upvoted your post. However, I changed my thinking on that and, accordingly, would argue against what you have here.

I'll just talk about this generally as a number of related scenarios apply; for example, removing any use VERSION statement, changing to various earlier VERSIONs, changing to a VERSION earlier than 5.12, and so on. These comments would also apply, to a certain degree, when starting with a VERSION later than 5.36.

See "perl5360delta: use v5.36" for the features enabled by that VERSION.

Here's just some of the things you'd have to deal with:

• strict is enabled for all versions since (and including) 5.12; so you wouldn't necessarily lose that.
• warnings was first enabled in 5.36; so you would definitely lose that.
• signatures were introduced in 5.20, so you might lose that and need to rewrite "sub find_pm($workDir) {...}" in the code presented (and potentially rewrite similar code elsewhere).
• signatures were experimental prior to 5.36. Local policy may mean not using them or including use experimental signatures (or similar).
• builtin was introduced in 5.36; so you would definitely lose that and need to rewrite any code using it.

Having to remember to explicitly "use strict;" may not be necessary and, even it was, it pales into insignificance against all of the other things you'd have to remember to do.