Thanks for all of your posts and wonderful insights. I think I may have worded my request in such a way that it put focus on the wrong issue: the warnings for using the feature.
When the issue I was actually hoping to get addressed, more specifically, was that perls <5.18 didn't recognize the "experimental::smartmatch" and would throw a compile-time error. This prevented the script from even running to throw warnings or anything else.
I think haukex inadvertently came across the solution as no if $] ge '5.018', warnings => "experimental::smartmatch"; seems to work fine. What I was using (use warnings;\nno warnings "experimental::smartmatch";) threw the error. I guess the seemingly minor difference in syntax solves the issue.