I think I can understand why, too. The logical operators are used to test for success of a constructor. How could that work if $baz = FunkOpera->new(...) or die $! returned sub { $baz or die $!}?

Well, the same way as $baz = FunkOpera->new(...) + die $! returning sub {$baz + die $!} I guess.

But the reason || and && aren't overloadable is very different. The reason is that operators aren't the things that carry the overload magic - the operands do. So to know whether an operator acts like it's overloaded, you first need to know the value of all its operands. This is not a problem for most operators, as it needs to know the value of both operands before know what its value will be. But || and && act differently - their left operand is evaluated to find out whether or not to evaluate its right operand.