Well -- I was comparing Perl to Python in this case. There is roughly the same amount of boilerplate and both are easier to read than bash's redirection.

The wart is that you need IPC::Open3 or equivalent because Perl's intrinsics can not synthesize the pipe operator (though you will think that they can) if you need to insert yourself into the middle of a chain of commands.

Nowadays there are decent wrappers for calling Open3 but more commonly you just find people running one half of the command, buffering the output, and passing it to the second half.