But, no, it is not what I'm looking for

UPDATE: Corrected "vendor" to "perl/vendor" (below)

Ok ... back to thinking that you do want a perl installation of some sort.
Note that Strawberry Perl includes a couple of sizeable directories that are not part of a standard windows perl installation - namely "c" and "perl/vendor". (The "cpan", "licences" and "win32" directories are also absent on a standard build of Windows perl - but, between them, they take up less than 2 megabytes.)
My standard build of latest blead (version 5.29.7) on Windows 7 consumes 45 megabytes on my hard drive - which can be tarred and gzipped down to 12 megabytes.
The same figures would apply also to perl-5.28.0.

I'm thinking that shouldn't be considered to be "too large and unwieldy".
Even over a slow internet connection, a 12 megabyte download should be quite acceptable.
And 45 megabytes of space is hardly a consideration in the 21st century.

Cheers,
Rob