Since I discovered it (solely thanks to this community), I tend to (probably over) use autodie in cases similar to the fork example - relying on perl/the OS to make a sensible report (which, in most cases, they do) - resulting in code such as ...

use autodie;

if (my $pid = fork) {
    # Some parenting wouldn't go amiss
} else {
    # Do some child stuff
}
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As for the simple, value based wantarray example, I quite like your tfu approach...