Yes you're perfectly right. I normally don't use the object oriented interface of Dumper Just the procedural one hence I missed that I passed the anonymous hash to the dumper which it still references even if I assign a new hash to $load. I actually changed the code to always use Data::Dumper->Dump() now, that's easier then updating the anonymous hash through a slice assignment As for the die handler. There is a overall die handler like this, could this be the source of the issues?

$SIG{__DIE__} = sub { LOGDIE $@ };
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