Clarity is rather in the eye of the beholder. But as a general thing smaller code (as long as it's not obfuscated) is easier to unpack. In this case there are two Perlish things that are likely to trip up a novice. The first is grep which is easy to find documentation for. The second is the list assignment which is kinda hard to formulate a good search for!

The saving grace is for novices who don't know what they don't know the assignment looks kinda innocuous and it's likely their eyes just glaze over for a moment as they recognize it as a wobbly assignment and move on. For this example that's pretty much OK because the real lesson is filtering a list. That said, YMMV!