Then go for it. Some functions have funky parsing rules that accept barewords. Some functions accept the names of file handles. This is has does both.

However, I disagree that passing a file handle* to a function that expects a file handle is somehow more complex than passing the name of the file handle you want to pass. (I should have used *STDOUT, though. There was no need to take a reference, although references to glob work a bit more often than just globs.)

By the way, the real name for "quoted bareword" is "quoted string literal" or (laxly) "quoted string".

* — Well, technically, the file handle is obtained by dereferencing *STDOUT{IO}, but *STDOUT is one step closer than 'STDOUT'.