Thank you for taking the time to reply to help me out! Adding use local::lib did not work unfortunately. Even though I have local::lib installed on the remote machine, I now get this error:

Can't locate local/lib.pm in @INC (you may need to install the local::
+lib module) (@INC contains: /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/mach/5.32 
+/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.32/mach /usr/lo
+cal/lib/perl5/5.32) at ./json_test line 4.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at ./json_test line 4.
[download]

but what did end up solving it was to replace this line:

use lib "/home/user/perl5/lib";

with this line:

use lib "/home/user/perl5/lib/perl5";

I do include both the use strict; and use warnings; pragmas in all of my programs but omitted them here for clarity and brevity. Perhaps I'll include them in the future to propagate better coding hygiene!

Edited to add: This solution still feels "off" as it isn't very portable. So any other suggestions would still be appreciated.