... about as clear an expression of your desired behavior as you will find.

I would have thought that something like the following would be much more clear. Note that List::MoreUtils::any has the same short-circuiting behavior as  || (logical-or).

use List::MoreUtils qw(any);
...
help() if any { $_ eq q{} } $server, $user, $database, $password, ... 
+;
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