The three strings to be concatenated are given in a different order than from left to right, which might be counter-intuitive for a casual reader.

Fat arrow to the rescue?

join $separator => @things{'this', 'that', 'the other'};
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However, where the task at hand is better described as prepending and appending to a string, rather than sewing together a list of arbitrary length, I concur with some others in this topic that concatenation is clearer.

-Mike