The JSON spec allows anonymous arrays at the top level.:

s$ perl -MData::Dumper -MJSON::Tiny=j -E 'say Dumper j(q{["snow","whit
+e","1212whatever"]})'
$VAR1 = [
          'snow',
          'white',
          '1212whatever'
        ];
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But your data is saved as the output from Data::Dumper, and the "$VAR1 =" portion isn't JSON. If you can't change your storage format, you will probably need to revive that with eval.

Check out the documentation for Data::Dumper.