Whilst I would generally agree, there's a few places where I consider using $_ to be reasonable. They're mostly the places where I'm not using it explicitly.

So something like:

     while ( <$input> ) { 
         chomp; 
         my @row = split;
         #stuff
     }
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I think is fine, because you _are_ naming it - but still using $_ to preprocess. Likewise sometimes a for loop of the form:

     $_ -> methodcall() for @objects;
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I'm increasingly starting to appreciate it - and as a rule of thumb, if I'm actually _writing_ $_ outside of a single line command (e.g. map/grep/for) then I should be using a named variable.