I think tail call elimination aka optimization is wrong here , because it's not optimized in Perl (you noted it's slow)

A slow tail call elimination is still a tail call elimination. While it may be used as a speed optimization in other languages, it has another benefit: Not generating a new stack frame. This optimization of memory usage could even be considered the main reason for using it (allowing recursion to be used to create loops without extra memory usage). This is the reason for using tail call elimination that's relevant here, as I mentioned.

I would return names not references

Also called symbolic references. So yeah, that works. One doesn't even need to turn off strict if you call them as methods ($self->$method()). I was keeping size and complexity minimal.

It does, but only once as Boolean test.

ah, I missed that. Still, the gist of what I said is still accurate.