It's only a better option if you don't care about the performance gains from mod_perl.

It's not hard to run the sort of proxy setup that the page you read in the mod_perl guide recommends. However, the purpose of that is increasing scalability. Most sites don't need scalability because they hardly get any traffic. Don't fret about this kind of thing unless you expect your site to be relatively large in terms of numbers of concurrent users.

FWIW, mod_php has the same issue with process size if you run it with a code cache (sometimes called an accelerator). If you run it without one, it's slower than mod_perl.