it's almost TL;DR, so two separate posts might have been better. :)

Just three remarks:

• IIRC there is a hard limit for the length of a regex-string ... (or was it only the repetition counter .{x} limited to x aprox 32000 ?)
• "newer" Perls come with something called trie-optimization which will considerably speed up such or-clauses.
• Trie-optimization has definitely a hard limit, where it falls back to (much slower) old behaviour.

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