I've been wondering if Data::Dumper is getting on towards its freshness date

Data::Dumper has been maintained by P5P alongside the core, so it's unlikely to go stale. It's just a bit unfortunate (IMHO) that its Useqq option is off by default - the other options I use in the linked post are mostly for "nicer" output, so as long as you write use Data::Dumper; $Data::Dumper::Useqq=1;, the module is fine. Data::Dump has prettier output by default, but if you look at its issue list you'll see it's not perfect either. There are lots of other dumper modules out there. The main things to remember are that you want the modules to give unambiguous output (hence Useqq) and that these modules are debugging aids and not data serialization tools.