You neglected to mention POE in your list of alternatives. I use it in favor of threads because it is stable, unlike threads. It manages to do all the work inside a single process with cooperative multitasking. Nothing really runs simultaneously but it can look like it.
Yes, that's a fair characterization. I'd have disappeared Event from your list and kept POE had I needed to remove one. I never got Event to compile so AFAICT, it isn't "current." POE's the thing these days especially when you don't want to involve all the requisite bugs and magic of threads or are on a Windows machine.
PS, Windows installs are the most common platform for perl to be on these days.