In fact, often I see <...> used in array context immediately followed by a foreach loop iterating over the array, and it makes me cringe.

Or immediately preceded by map?

open my $fh, q{<}, q{stop_words.txt}
  or die qq{cant open stop: $!\n};

my %stop = map{chomp; $_ => undef} <$fh>;
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In fact I have a trivial wrapper MyIO script where I can

my @array = $io->read_array(q{smallish_file});
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and later

$io->write_array(q{tweaked_file}, \@array);
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There are a couple for strings too (and for returning a hash). If it isn't a 'big' file, say an Apache access log, I never bother with file handles. They are always an intermediate step I could do without.

About the only file handle I use regularly is <DATA> because it is handy when posting on PerlMonks. :-)