in general: don't trust people telling you to never do this or that. ;)
second, i think you overestimate the complexity of that handler problem. as you can see from e.g. perldoc -f local, it's very easy to let every process take control over its own reactions on __DIE__ and __WARN__ signals. and if you strictly distiguish between the process and the modules it loads it becomes fairly clear (to me), that a module should simply die, whilst the process redirects that signal to maybe a logging thread or any other appropriate stuff.