FWIW, seems nobody mentioned it yet, but there is a feature to make bitwise or operate on numbers only.

see perlop#Bitwise-Or-and-Exclusive-Or

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use feature 'bitwise';
no warnings 'experimental::bitwise';


my $or;
for  my $x (@ARGV){
  $or |= $x ;
}

printf("%d\n", $or);

exit;
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C:/Perl_524/bin\perl.exe  d:/pm/bitwise_or.pl 16 8
24
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update

and I agree it's counter intuitive because it's normal in Perl to have dedicated operators and expect automatic type casting. Here Perl is rather acting like JS.