$my_properly_named_array[$#my_properly_named_array] doesn't look like QoL.

Yeah, but $#list is better used for writing loops:

  foreach my $i (0..$#list) {
    say "$i: $list[$i]";
  }

For getting the last element from a list you can just use -1 (and of course further negative numbers work like you would expect, -2 is second to last and so on):

  my @last_three = @items[-1, -2, -3];

yes, I forgot perl have negative index!