Works for me with the current version of PDF::Table (0.9.6) - but not with an older version (0.9.3).
Also, note that $pdf->corefont("Helvetica", -encoding => "utf8") creates and embeds a font instance every time you make that call. I.e., an optmization would be to create the font object just once
my $helvetica = $pdf->corefont("Helvetica", -encoding => "utf8");
and then just pass the same reference to the individual cells
...
$cell_props->[$j]->[$k] = {
font => $helvetica,
font_size => 15,
background_color => '#FFCA00', #
font_color => '#fD4D4D', #
justify => "left",
};
...
This cuts down the PDF size for the sample code from 290k to 9k.