See Bruce Gray - Refactoring and Readability: Crouching Regex, Hidden Structures for a nice intro into pure Perl/raku options.

I do not know if there is a CPAN module that interfaces these external tools, but you may be interested in hxpipe that W3C provides. For example,

hxpipe (1)           - convert XML to a format easier to parse with Perl or AWK

Here's the full list, which includes tools that support selecting elements.

cexport (1)          - create headerfile of exported declarations from a C file
hxaddid (1)          - add ID's to selected elements
hxcite (1)           - replace bibliographic references by hyperlinks
hxcite-mkbib (1)     - expand references and create bibliography
hxcopy (1)           - copy an HTML file while preserving relative links
hxcount (1)          - count elements and attributes in HTML or XML files
hxextract (1)        - extract selected elements
hxclean (1)          - apply heuristics to correct an HTML file
hxprune (1)          - remove marked elements from an HTML file
hxincl (1)           - expand included HTML or XML files
hxindex (1)          - create an alphabetically sorted index
hxmkbib (1)          - create bibliography from a template
hxmultitoc (1)       - create a table of contents for a set of HTML files
hxname2id            - move some ID= or NAME= from A elements to their parents
hxnormalize (1)      - pretty-print an HTML file
hxnum (1)            - number section headings in an HTML file
hxpipe (1)           - convert XML to a format easier to parse with Perl or AWK
hxprintlinks (1)     - number links & add table of URLs at end of an HTML file
hxremove (1)         - remove selected elements from an XML file
hxtabletrans (1)     - transpose an HTML or XHTML table
hxtoc (1)            - insert a table of contents in an HTML file
hxuncdata (1)        - replace CDATA sections by character entities
hxunent (1)          - replace HTML predefined character entities to UTF-8
hxunpipe (1)         - convert output of pipe back to XML format
hxunxmlns (1)        - replace "global names" by XML Namespace prefixes
hxwls (1)            - list links in an HTML file
hxxmlns (1)          - replace XML Namespace prefixes by "global names"
asc2xml, xml2asc (1) - convert between UTF8 and &#nnn; entities
hxref (1)            - generate cross-references
hxselect (1)         - extract elements that match a (CSS) selector

And FWIW, Sphinx also provides HTML stripping. Not sure how you'd use it, but it can be done when ingesting data for indexing.