I see it less as the fun of the journey, and more as the chance to become better, and make better tools for yourself going forwards. Advancing your position is more tempting than just doing the task.

It's not always apparent how the side-quests will help us. But man, I can think of a half-dozens of upsides of the work here. You now have a portal Perl you can use anywhere. You don't have to maintain & keep a fork of ExifTool up to date. You've learned a ton about wasm file system interactions which could be useful for any portable systems. There's so many incidentals, that people just don't see when they blaze through to "but it could be easier."