The extra parentheses are not necessary (and indeed if you look at this expression in perl -MO=Deparse,-p you'll see they aren't being parsed at all how you expect): my $subref = \&NotYetLoadedModule::mysub; is fine.

Class::Load looks in the symbol table in order to check if a module is "loaded" (this is to allow for inlined packages, that didn't come from a file).

The issue was filed as https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=108388 and is not resolvable as this is simply how Class::Load works. Generally you're better off using Module::Runtime::require_module, which looks in %INC, a much more reliable mechanism to tell if a module has loaded.

-ETHER (Karen Etheridge)