I think perhaps it's balanced against other issues, though, and shouldn't necessarily be a singular goal.

Oh, definitely. It's a bit of a silly "metric", of course. My point about the complex data structures was that, if you have to do

$blah->{something}->{and_deeper}->[12]
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you'll be pretty bug prone and so you might consider refactoring into something like

$deeper->item(12)
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...which is why I put method calls on one lower level of egregiousness :)