Or did it? It's like asking whether a falling tree in a forest makes a sound if noone hears it.

If you change the code to see whether it actually dies, it does:

$ perl -e 'eval{die @_ if $^S; 1} or print "$@"'
Died at -e line 1.
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Now, since the die is inside an eval, the die doesn't cause the program to terminate.