For as long as I remember doing Perl development, there was always a limitation that a quantifier like + or * wouldn't actually match an unlimited number of characters, but at most a fixed, upper limit.

IIRC in the days of perl 5.8, it was more like 2**15.

It seems the situation has improved a bit for + and *, but you can still see the explicit limit with the generic quantifier:

$ perl -Mre=debug -e '/.{2,}/'
Compiling REx ".{2,}"
Final program:
   1: CURLY {2,32767} (4)
   3:   REG_ANY (0)
   4: END (0)
minlen 2 
Freeing REx: ".{2,}"
[download]

So the upper limit for {2,} is actually 32767 (== 2**15 - 1), not unlimited.

If its been fixed already, which version did the fix happen?

I don't think it was ever fixed.

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