The problem is, as identified by bart, that binmode affects the open file associate with a filehandle. Besides that a BEGIN block will happen before the file is opened, the diamond operator can also open multiple files, each of which would need to be binmoded.

I keep thinking about some sort of tieing of *ARGV in a BEGIN block?

If that could be made to work and stuck in some suitably short named module, the you could do something like:

perl -margvb -ne" ... * files
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