The thing to be aware of in this case is to the following note on the module documentation.

Note 1: The default value for 'KeyAttr' is ['name', 'key', 'id']. If y
+ou do not want folding on input or unfolding on output you must setti
+ng this option to an empty list to disable the feature.
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So, since you have an element named 'name', XML::Simple does that grouping trick.
What you need to do is to set KeyAttr to an empty list

my $xml   = XML::Simple->new(KeyAttr=>[]);
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