It is not an insurmountable limitation. All that you have to do is, every time the line doesn't parse, accumulate it into a buffer, and then prepend it to the next line. That will handle embedded returns.

There is no reason that this piece of logic couldn't be built into Text::CSV. You could even name it getline to mirror what Text::CSV_XS does. But it isn't there so people tend to get this wrong.

Incidentally here it is, (untested):

sub Text::CSV::getline {
  my $self = shift;
  my $fh = shift;
  my $line = "";
  my $line_no;
  while (<$fh>) {
    $line_no ||= $.;
    $line .= $_;
    return if $self->parse($line);
  }
  if ($line) {
    die "CSV parse error at line $line_no";
  }
}
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