From the discussion a while back on this forum, the return is no more bogus than any other return that's at the natural end anyway.

Hmmmm. When I run:

#! /usr/bin/perl
return 1;
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perl tells me

Can't return outside a subroutine at return.pl line 2
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So I guess the previous discussion was somewhat inaccurate.

Apologies that this is not help in solving your original problem.