Pod::Simple output as POD

I am writing concerning 
https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=116467.  The objective of 
this ticket is to revise t/porting/podcheck.t so that it no longer 
depends on CPAN module Pod::Parser.  The latter has been designated 
"legacy code" but we cannot remove it from the core distribution until 
podcheck.t no longer depends on it, either directly (calls to 
parse_from_filehandle) or indirectly (via an older version of 
Pod::Checker which depends on Pod::Parser rather than Pod::Simple).

While studying podcheck.t recently I noticed that we could get 
substantially closer to our goal if we took the following subroutine 
from podcheck.t:

#####
sub extract_pod {   # Extracts just the pod from a file; returns undef 
if file
                     # doesn't exist
     my $filename = shift;

     my @pod;

     # Arrange for the output of Pod::Parser to be collected in an array 
we can
     # look at instead of being printed
     tie *ALREADY_FH, 'Tie_Array_to_FH', \@pod;
     if (open my $in_fh, '<:bytes', $filename) {
         my $parser = Pod::Parser->new();
         $parser->parse_from_filehandle($in_fh, *ALREADY_FH);
         close $in_fh;

         return join "", @pod
     }
...
#####

... and could rewrite the 'if' block using a Pod::Simple-based call.  
However, AFAICT there is nothing in the latest CPAN release of 
Pod::Simple by which one could simple extract the POD from a file and 
return it as a single string, POD-formatting intact and otherwise 
unmodified.

Karl Williamson noted 
(https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=116467#txn-1304150) that 
there have been some efforts in this direction, citing: 
https://github.com/genehack/pod-simple/tree/add-pod-simple-pod. Could 
you advise as to the current state of development of this fork and 
whether it is likely to be of benefit to P5P in this instance?

Thank you very much.
Jim Keenan