Yes, I'm aware, but when using smart matching (that is, the given/when pair which has had it's fair share of trouble, and is currently experimental after having not been), you sometimes want to be able to distinguish between those types of tests when doing a smart match[1].

I believe the article was referencing this, and so while yes, anyone who knows how to use Perl will use the appropriate operator for the appropriate type of type operation, there are reasons to still want to distinguish what type of match is done by the smart match operator, '~~'.

1: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlop.html#Smartmatch-Operator