I haven't seen tilly's node before, but i've had some success using CPANs Text::CSV_XS on fields with embedding newlines by with the binary=>1 option...

my $csv = new Text::CSV_XS({'binary' => 1});
my $fh = wraphandle(\*STDIN);
my $columns = 1;

while ($columns = $csv->getline($fh) and
       defined $columns and
       scalar(@$columns)) {
    
    # do stuff with @$columns

}
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