TL;DR

The real PAUSE workaround.

After my post PAUSE workaround, where I tell a little story of how I tripped onto PAUSE’s indexer and how I worked that around in a terrible (although admittedly effective) way, Joel Berger gently pointed me to the real way of addressing that problem:

I think you can use this https://metacpan.org/pod/CPAN::Meta::Spec#no_index to tell PAUSE to ignore the offending package

And, of course, Joel is 100% right.

The last mile (why is there always a last mile?!?) was to figure out how to set it up in Dist::Zilla/Milla. Luckily, this was easy thanks to Dist::Zilla::Plugin::MetaNoIndex:

[MetaNoIndex]
package = CPAN::Modulelist

So I reverted the change to the module, used the plugin… and it works!

Thanks Joel Berger 😄