Je-Strom,
We have found the root cause of this problem - unfortunately I can’t send the solution back to 2022, but we and will shortly be implementing a fix.
The issue here is that perlcritic transitively relies on File::Find to search for Policy Modules, and File::Find is constructing the search path incorrectly on Windows. This behavior has been fixed in Perl 5.38+ – History for ext/File-Find/lib/File/Find.pm - Perl/perl5 · GitHub
Perlcritic currently works in Perl 5.38+, We are backporting the fixes into Perls 5.36, and 5.34. So this problem should disappear entirely in ActivePerl 5.34+ sometime next week.
Best,
Marc