in reply to exit this way

I'm agnostic about the many recommendations here to follow the practice your overlords are seeking to impose. But if you do so, remember that exit() doesn't always exit immediately ...

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use feature qw/ say /; main(); exit(0); sub main { say 'Exiting'; } END { say 'Not done yet'; }
Output:
$ perl 1140667.pl Exiting Not done yet $

The way forward always starts with a minimal test.