After looking into the source I discovered this

sub longmess {
    local($!, $^E);
    # Icky backwards compatibility wrapper. :-(
    #
    # The story is that the original implementation hard-coded the
    # number of call levels to go back, so calls to longmess were off
    # by one.  Other code began calling longmess and expecting this
    # behaviour, so the replacement has to emulate that behaviour.
    my $cgc = _cgc();
    my $call_pack = $cgc ? $cgc->() : caller();
    if ( $Internal{$call_pack} or $CarpInternal{$call_pack} ) {
        return longmess_heavy(@_);
    }
    else {
        local $CarpLevel = $CarpLevel + 1;
        return longmess_heavy(@_);
    }
}
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"of by one" :(