The BEGIN block *can't* be run until the block is finished being compiled. If the block is finished being compiled, it is reasonable to expect that barewords would have been detected. As I show elsewhere, other types of 'strict' errors are handled correctly here.

So I don't see how your reading of the documentation explains this problem away. The quoted section says that it runs before the "rest of the containing file is parsed". The error is in the code being run. It certainly can and should report fatal errors in that code before it runs it.