In Windows, it's up to each program to parse their command line. It's not up to the shell. So it's up to Perl to parse the command line.

Yes, this is bonkers.

Unfortunately, that's the idiotic price for perfects backwards compatibility. MS-DOS has done it this way, so Windows does it this way, too. And i rather suspect, MS-DOS did it this way, because the command line interpreter for Microsoft Basic (which was the "shell" of many 8 bit computers) did this for the "run" command - just push the rest of the command line on the stack (or just leave it in the input buffer, as it were) and have the newly started program figure it out.

"8-Bit Show And Tell" on Youtube has you covered there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC2--B9ZhUA