Thanks for getting back. Yeah, I just discovered the .perlcriticrc file is not working as I assumed it was. I'm about to go back to the documentation and fill my gap in knowledge of how .perlcriticrc files work. my .perlcriticrc file is in the directory above my test. I thought perlcritic searched up the directory tree for .perlcriticrc files. And it seemed to work. When I increased the severity setting in the rc file, I saw more warnings. So I figured it worked as I thought.

But then I copied the .perlcriticrc file directly into my test directory and now the pesky warning is gone.

So clearly I don't know how the perlcritic config files are found/used.

OK, so the ALE vim plugin I was using searches up the directory tree for the nearest perlcritic file. I have no idea why ALE was ignoring directives in the config but at any rate, that's not a perl problem.