Agreed. It is just that I am treating that "\/Date(<epoch>)\/" as a basic string enclosed in double quotes. My problem is with those single backslashes getting replaces by double backslashes.

Um no. In the OP you have double backslashes; you start with double backslashes;

use JSON qw/ to_json /;
my @fudge = "\/Date(<epoch>)\/";
print to_json( \@fudge );
__END__
["/Date(<epoch>)/"]
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