But hardcoding the full path to which perl binary to use is - in my opinion - even less helpfull.

And your solution is to replace it with another hardcoded path?

What makes you think that those new, cool platforms you are referring to have an env, and it's in the location you presume it is? I mean, if they deliver their new, cool platform, with a perl, not in /usr/bin, but elsewhere in $PATH, they may as well have env elsewhere as well.

You seem to have a perceived problem, which you are fixing with a solution that suffers from exactly the same potential problem.