You've got some good points, but you go a bit too far. There's always a way of coding things that doesn't run afowl of this stricture, and it doesn't involve extra work for the coder. It is also, as a nice side-effect, more efficent, and doesn't have a tendency to make things not work on odd filenames. Just do what the shell would yourself, and pass a list of multiple elements, or when you meant to have a single argument, don't put it in double-quotes.

Also, ain't nobody (sane) forcing you to use Perl::Critic. I'm not sure if it's lexical or "no"able, though...