This explains why I'm seeing it but not why it is absent in your case. I'll leave that part to you. :-)

Heh ... yeah, fair enough ;-)
AFAICT it's pretty simple. By the time perl-5.36.0 comes along, Sawyer has removed the Scalar::Util requirement from File/Copy.pm.

Frid'y night (alcohol-fuelled) aside: Given the ease with which perl can be built & installed, and that perl-5.38.0 is only a few months away, I'm surprised that serious perl-users are still running perl-5.34.x.
I see it as being symptomatic of the mentality expressed poignantly by Frank Zappa in "A Token of My Extreme" (Joe's Garage):

Some people think that if they go too far, they'll never get back to w
+here the rest of them are.
[download]

Cheers,
Rob