It sounds like you have fallen victim to the fact that perldata gives an overly narrow defintion for "bareword" while also using the term "bareword" the much broader way that I tend to.

The thing is, a bareword "will be treated as if it were a quoted string." That means => does nothing except prevent the default behaviour from being "outlawed" using use strict 'subs';.

To be clear, => does much more than prevent strict.pm from firing. => actually does some dramatic syntax transformation:

time,           # time()
time=>          # 'time'
s,this,that,    # A substitution
s=>this=>that=> # Three strings
die if 0;       # No-op
die if , 0;     # Syntax error
die if => 0;    # die "if",0;
q=<0==1         # '<0'=1
q=>0==1         # 'q',0==1
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