XML::LibXML is a nice wrapper around libXML.

XML::Twig is great if you need to process huge files.

XML::Rabbit will seamlessly map your XML into objects.

There are things to criticise Perl for, like idiosyncratic argument handling in subroutines or the use of weird punctuation variables, but to call out XML parsing as particularly hard is questionable.

Take a look at this example from https://grantm.github.io/perl-libxml-by-example/basics.html

  use XML::LibXML;
  
  my $filename = 'playlist.xml';
  
  my $dom = XML::LibXML->load_xml(location => $filename);
  
  foreach my $title ($dom->findnodes('/playlist/movie/title')) 
  {
      say $title->to_literal();
  }