I am confused. Why do you think the AM's Strawberry Perl is more than 10 years old? Strawberry's 5.42 PDL bundle comes with libgd which reports as 2.0303 with GD::LIBGD_VERSION (the numeric version) or 2.3.3 with GD::VERSION_STRING (the string version):

C:\Users\pryrt>perl -MGD -le "print for GD::LIBGD_VERSION, GD::VERSION
+_STRING"
2.0303
2.3.3
[download]

IOW, if GD::LIBGD_VERSION reports 2.0303, it is v2.3.3, which, AFAICT from https://github.com/libgd/libgd/releases, is the newest GD version available, and is almost a decade newer than the 2.0.33 (2.0033) that is the minimum required version. update: since that's what the AM's libgd is reporting, it's not truly a version issue.

I think the right path to go down is trying to dig into which options Strawberry compiles into the libgd, because I know that some of the options are not necessarily on by default.

A few years back, I know I figured out how to build my own, because the one that came with Strawberry hadn't enabled windows BMP (IIRC -- it may have been some different image type, but I think it was BMP). Unfortunately, I don't have access to the machine with that build anymore, and any notes I may have had are also apparently only on that machine, so lost to me.

But my guess is that really, Perl-GD is seeing that libgd doesn't have animated GIF enabled in the build, and is incorrectly labling that as "library too old" rather that "option not enabled".

I don't have time this week to dig in any deeper, but if others haven't made progress this week, I'll try looking at it after the holiday busyness has calmed down.

---

update: cross out intro sentences, because partway through my answer, I answered my own question: you thought it was more than 10 years old because GD incorrectly claimed "libgd 2.0.33 or higher required for animated GIF support" despite being v2.3.3 on the AM's machine.