Update: Oops... I meant this post as a reply to this post, not to myself, but that's ok, no need to re-parent. :)

As you have, I think, suggested elsewhere and as the documentation itself cheerfully admits, a rewrite of this section would be welcome.

That the section begins with a discussion of the evils of zero-width match infinite loops accompanied by a bunch of Perl code examples of such matches that don't actually "work" (in the sense that they don't produce infinite loops) is not helpful. The discussion finally gets around to saying that the Perl RE does not, in fact, allow such loops, but by then one may have been led far down the garden path and abandoned in the dark forest.