I think your disdain may be misplaced. Whenever writing perl code it is always important to consider the audience for the code you are writing; the compiler is one member (and a very important member) of that audience, but so are you as the author, and often so are other people that may need to maintain it or desire to understand it in the future.

I frequently use return at the end of a function or method. I frequently omit return at the end of a function or method. Which I choose to do in any particular situation is primarily down to whether I feel the return adds clarity.

It is rare that I write code that is so resource-critical an extra opcode would make a difference; when I do, of course, I don't use return.

Hugo