I think the "no error if not found" part only applies to when Perl does it, not when you do it.

You could work around this by using eval:

sub DESTROY {
    ... cleanup ...
    eval {
        $self->SUPER::DESTROY();
    };
};
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Personally, I simply look at whether the class I'm inheriting from implements a DESTROY method, and if so, I invoke that, and if not, I invoke none. In recent times, I've found inheritance to be too much of a bother anyway and mostly use aggregation and delegation to construct more complex objects.