No. Perl never uses latin-1.

In the first case (print "\xEA";), Perl is expecting bytes, and you provided a string of bytes, so it printed the bytes (as-is). It didn't warn because you provided what was expected.

In the second case (print "\x{44B}";), Perl is expecting bytes, and you didn't provided a string of bytes, so it guesses that you meant to encode them using UTF-8, does so, and warns.

In the third case (print "\xC3\xAA";), Perl is expecting bytes, and you provided a string of bytes, so it printed the bytes (as-is). It didn't warn because you provided what was expected.

(A string a bytes is a string consisting of entirely characters with a value less than 256.)