I had to include the 'our' or 'use var' statement so that Perl wouldn't croak a 'Global symbol "$DEBUG" requires explicit package name at...' error.

Not so.

$ cat ConfigThisJunk.pm
package ConfigThisJunk;
use strict;
use warnings;
BEGIN
{
    use Exporter;
    our @ISA = qw( Exporter );
    our @EXPORT_OK = qw( $DEBUG );
}
our $DEBUG = 1;
1;

$ perl -wle'use strict; use ConfigThisJunk qw( $DEBUG ); print $DEBUG'
1
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I believe the second one is deprecated now

Yeah, ignore that. They both have their uses. Think of it as "'our' is a better choice if both 'use vars' and 'our' fits your needs".