But when a member of the steering committee bumps the required minimum versions of most of his many dists to 5.12, for no technical reason that's a bad sign. And many of his dists are upstream, so he's effectively forcing all dists that depend on his to also have an artificial minimum required perl version than is necessary.

But that's only for the newest versions of his modules. You don't have to use the newest version of them just like you don't have to use the newest version of Perl. If you want to run 5.10 that's up to you - having to work a tiny bit harder to ensure you use compatible versions of modules is only to be expected, no?

FWIW, I think that dropping active support for perl versions which are no longer shipped with any pre-EOL O/S seems perfectly reasonable.