I'm sure it does. But what does it work for? As shown it is a match that doesn't capture anything and will match a < at the start of a line, followed by anything at all for as much as it can manage, until it finds a >. For example, all the following match:
'<>'
'<tag>'
"< line of quoted text in an email using '<' instead of the more usual
+ '>'"
'<tag>the stuff OP wanted to retreive</tag>'
note that what is matched isn't even what OP wants to retreive. OP was after element data - the bit between a start tag and a end tag.
BTW, the regex matches the whole last sample line, not just the start tag as you might have expected: .* is greedy.
DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel
| 