Yeah, fixing the module to allow a file handle to be given instead of just a file name is quite in line with the trivial work that I noted might be required.

Though, I suspect that Perl provides a way for declaring a default encoding for all file handles, perhaps related to "locale" settings. So I'm not even convinced that your objection is even technically correct. (Though, if Perl does not provide such a feature, perhaps you should look into providing one, IMHO. :)

I'm actually a bit surprised that open does not already support (according to my recent scanning of the documentation):

    open my $fh, '<:encoding(UTF-8) foo.csv'
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which would have also been a route that would have worked with the unchanged Text::xSV.

but he did have to think about proving a means of providing decoded input

No, the author didn't have to think about that. The author just needed to allow a file handle to be given, even if the reason for allowing such had nothing to do with the author thinking about decoded input. I very often support taking a filehandle not just a filename, and very rarely is that due to me having thought about encodings.