looks like I will be using perlcritic a lot from now on.

Take it serious, but not too serios. PBP is just that. Best practices, not religion. You will probably not burn in hell if you ignore it. But the one that has to take over your code may wish so. ;-)

In fact, not all "best practices" in PBP are considered "best" among the perlmonks. For that reason, you can configure perlcritic to ignore some rules, or to rate them higher or lower than default.

I'm surprised it doesn't complain about the lack of commenting too.

Comments != documentation. See Pod::Coverage and Test::Pod::Coverage.

I prefer having only few comments in my code, mostly only in places where I fear that my future self may come back and hurt me, i.e. whenever I choose to write cryptic code, use side-effects, or assume special conditions.

Documentation is a completely different thing. At least the API should be clearly documented, often also the algorithms used.

Alexander