Not much reinventing... You could nicely wrap it up into some sub like inplace_edit() that you then call every time you need "perl -pi -e...":

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

sub inplace_edit {
    my ($callback, @files) = @_;
    return unless ref($callback) eq "CODE";
    local $^I = "";
    local *ARGV;
    @ARGV = @files;
    while (<>) {
        $callback->();
        print;
    }
}

inplace_edit(
    sub {
        s/(foo|bar)/*\U$1*/;
    },
    "test.dat"
);


__END__
$ cat test.cat
foo
bar
baz
qux

$ ./833501.pl

$ cat test.dat
*FOO*
*BAR*
baz
qux
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