Still occurs with Strawberry Perl 5.36.1 and 5.38.0 (see below) although I suspect it is more generic than Strawberry Perl.
Running the code through nytprof shows 1000001 calls to main::CORE:substcont at line 10 take most of the time.
It does not happen when the $x repetition is set to 1e5. There was a possibly related thread here a few months ago about character repetitions and COW but I can't locate it right now.
0.224835157394409
0.228233814239502
v5.22.3
9.92650699615479
0.662662982940674
v5.28.0
8.49285101890564
0.744230985641479
v5.36.1
8.02936911582947
0.788676977157593
v5.38.0