I ++ your version because I prefer it to mine. But...

It is not at all comparable to testing $. in that sense.

Of course it is.

The result of the expression, $. == 0, is a flag who's only purpose is to detect the end-of-file condition. This is the express and only purpose of eof.

The difference is that eof can operate on a named filehandle whereas, $. is global and can be reset by a read operation on any filehandle. Call a function from within the loop that accesses a totally different filehandle and you completely screw the loop. This is not true for eof.

There’s someone more prominent than me who said that function is almost always a bad choice.

If you read the context of the link you gave, you'll see that it's author is saying that it is unnecessary to explicitly test eof in order to terminate a read loop, because

Perl returns an unambiguous end-of-file condition by yielding an undefined value. ... The while(<FH>) construction even does so automatically.

Which is an entirely different context to the one under discussion.