I think it was fair. Repeating undigested information by rote provides fertile grounds for myth and rumor.

Besides I'm unconvinced by your answer. I am unconvinced because it is also true that almost no one can explain every case in which direct constructor invocation can fail badly with unintelligible error messages. Here is an example:

# We have some code, and somewhere wrote
open(Foo, "> /dev/null") or die "Cannot write /dev/null: $!";

# Time passes...

my $obj = Foo->new;

# And elsewhere
package Foo;

sub new {
  bless {}, shift;
}

# ...

1;
[download]

And yes, I know that you are in the set of "almost no one".