The thing is, it doesn't matter how fast you are if you are giving the incorrect result. I was taking into account that a paragraph would have a newline on the end of each line.

This can be easily incorporated into the regex approaches. The problem so far is that .* doesn't match a newline. If you want that just add the /s modifier:

timethese(-3, {
    Hofmator  => '($chunk) = substr($string,0,201) =~ /(.*\S)\s/s',
    japhy     => '($chunk) = $string =~ /^(.{1,200})(?<!\s)(?!\w)/s;',
    tye       => '($chunk) = $string =~ /^(.{0,199}\S)\s/s',
});
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-- Hofmator