You know, there's plenty of things to criticize about CGI.pm, but the docs are not one of them. It has an excellent synopsis section. Many people essentially learned CGI programming from the CGI.pm docs.

And look at your header example: you didn't know that adding the charset to the end helps prevent cross-site scripting attacks, but CGI.pm did, and if you had used it you would have gotten the benefit of that knowledge for free.