Another way to (literally) look at it:

c:\@Work\Perl>perl -wMstrict -MData::Dump -le
"my @ra = ('hi') x 5;
 dd \@ra;
 ;;
 @ra = 'hi' x 5;
 dd \@ra;
"
["hi", "hi", "hi", "hi", "hi"]

["hihihihihi"]
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