Yes, I think you are correct:
CGI::Tiny is fundamentally different. It won't work for me. Believe it or not, I have used (or tried to)
CGI::Simple before. It won't work on my Mac, which is where I develop. So "Simple" didn't live up to its name for me.
I don't use CGI for much, actually. I use it for the form inputs, and that's about it. So if that is not the portion of its codebase that landed it on the "deprecated" list, I guess I should be fine. In any case, for now at least, I've given up on the CGI::Tiny. It's a tool for someone else. I'm back to good old CGI.
One thing that irritated me with CGI is that it only recognizes the "name" attribute of an element, and not its "id". But I guess I can live with assigning both, one for the JS, and one for the CGI. It just seems a shame to have to repeat so many names--fattens the code, and uses more bandwidth.