You do not "call" a shell.

You must fork a new process, exec it, let it run, wait for it to finish, reap it, and then return to whatever else you were doing. That's what system() does -- just to create a shell. And then the shell, once running, must do so again, to run whatever external command you asked it to do.

So you are running a thing which runs a thing and must wait for it to quit before you can wait for it to quit.

...which it does, having run the single, individual command you fed into backticks or system().

Imagine running full instances of Perl every time you needed to call uname in BASH even though uname has nothing to do with perl. That's the degree of pointless waste that happens when you write external-command-intensive programs in perl. It can be almost cripplingly wasteful.

Just using the shell in the manner it was meant to be used in the first place avoids quite a lot of round trip. Or you could write code in perl to the same effect, except that perl is pretty bad at that...

That's a nice feature, isn't it?

Code:

true && echo "this will print"
false && echo "this won't"
true || echo "neither will this"
false || echo "But this will"

sh had it first -- by decades.
You have backpedaled miles from your argument that shell code is somehow "unsafe" while perl code running plethoras of individual short-lived shells is somehow not.

Anyway. Would you agree that running awk thousands of individual times to process tiny amounts of data is a suboptimal use of it?

Perl is good at some things. I enjoy it for some things. Code like the OP is not an effective use of it.