No, taint checking is a dang stupid idea of a "fix". It doesn't actually fix anything and it makes lots of parts of your program bring everything to a screaching halt if you don't get a bunch of extra work done just right. And proposing it as a "fix" is a pretty clear demonstration of "you just don't get it at all".

An actual fix that is also not breaking tons of other parts of your code is simply $_= "< $_" for @ARGV; (done everywhere that @ARGV gets sets for <> to be used, though).

Now go fix just about every mention of <> in the documentation and hope that every person who ever uses <> non-hackishly jumps through your extra hoops and hope that the huge majority of them who won't (because it has been documented in dozens of places for decades that such hoops are not required) don't run into a truly evily-named file. And be happy that a few hackish programs don't require the slightest modification (even through a deprecation cycle) while every use of <> in the standard documentation is wrong.

Oh, and have fun fixing the documentation for -i. That even more obviously puts the lie to "it was designed to work that way".