TL;DR; - my modules had been up for adoption for *YEARS* already, but nobody was willing to take over maintenance - you can *NOT* just remove modules from CPAN. You can only schedule them for deletion after a week - during that period, no alarm bells started ringing that modules that had downstream dependencies, were being completely removed - I knew that my modules would always be available on BackPAN, and that it would be just a matter of someone re-uploading them and adjusting the master list. Annoying at best, because it would not be breaking anything that was already in production. - And I still had my own copies, so if anybody would have asked to please upload them again, I would have. Nobody did.
What this showed, is that CPAN has a definite vulnerability in this area: - someone (hopefully the owner) can schedule all modules for removal - if these modules have downstream dependencies, then that's too bad: they will stop working
Now, almost two years later, this vulnerability still exists.
As to the reason of me removing my Perl modules: it signalled my leaving the Perl community for good. Before that, I had still hope that some day, I actually would enjoy being part of the Perl community again.
Should I not have removed my modules like that? Well, I don't know how I could further indicate that I did not have any desire to keep maintaining them. The ADOPT-ME status was clearly not enough.