A modernisation of this using Plack is straightforwardly equivalent:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Plack::Request;
use Encode::Simple;
use JSON::MaybeXS;

my $app = sub {
    my $req = Plack::Request->new($_[0]);
    my $input = eval { decode 'UTF-8', $req->parameters->{'input'} };
    [ 200, [ 'Content-Type', 'application/json; charset=UTF-8' ], [ encode_json { output => uc $input } ] ];
};

This is now a full PSGI app and as such gains all the same additional deployment options of the Mojolicious example. To deploy it as a CGI script you add this line at the bottom:

use Plack::Handler::CGI; Plack::Handler::CGI->new->run($app);

In all it takes about twice as long to load as the CGI.pm example, compared to the Mojolicious example taking about 7× as long. In exchange you get all the benefits of the PSGI ecosystem – without losing any of the strengths of deploying as a CGI script, unlike the Mojolicious example.