This is you in nutshell. You were offered a chance to learn a really cool bit of Perl. You rejected it with a muffed rebuttal to show why it never should be proposed or used.

And why did it turn out to be “wrong?” Because the original code had unnecessary dependencies – “cleverness” – upon itself.

It turned out to be wrong because you tried to force your Dunning–Kruger POV on it. Your answers often fall into this: Your problem is easy to solve. All you must do is have a different problem.

You get downvoted because your posts are lazy, erroneous, self-aggrandizing, anti-Perl, or, like in this thread, incurious; and that you've burned your bridges.

If your theory on maintainable code being 100% devoid of cleverness held, you'd be the best hacker in the world because you're certainly the least clever.