One of the reasons load-time can be an issue, is for webservers that don't use mod_perl. Using modules that impose a large load-time hit can cause a measurable degradation if they are being loaded 100's of time a second as with a busy website cgi. That, as I understand it, is the very basis of mod_perls existance.

What made it interesting was the very fact that, if the benchmark is valid, it shows that the runtime hit due to strict is slightly more than 1/10 th of a millisecond, which when compared to beasts like cgi and the various DBI::* modules is so miniscule as to be totally irrelevant, which I found mildly interesting in the context of this thread.