I don't get what the issue is, I don't even know Perl and it seems pretty straightforward to me: Carp is a library with a set of mnemonic assertion functions for libraries to signal usage errors committed by their callers.

Do people just prefer one function with a bunch of fiddly little enums or something?

In my case I prefer sensible pragmatic names with some sort of hierarchy rather than random words from the dictionary.

People prefer what they've already learned.