quotemeta is intended to quote the regular expression metacharacters, not the metacharacters of all special syntax string parsing problems. Quotemeta is for perl regex only.

I believe "its" intent is to perform as documented. quotemeta is documented to escape all characters except /[A-Za-z_0-9]/. Regular expressions have nothing to do with it. quotemeta can be used anywhere such an escaping scheme is acceptable, including to quote text to include in generated

• regular expressions (/\Q$text\E/),
• sh commands (system("tool \Q$arg\E 2>&1")),
• non-Windows glob patterns (glob("\Q$path\E/*")),
• Perl code (qq{"\Q$text\E/"}),
• etc.

(Note that \Q..\E is just a shortcut for quotemeta.)

The wildcards in glob() are system-specific

Not anymore. They are documented in File::Glob.

Update: Added code samples.