As of Perl 5.26, heredocs can be indented without tricks to strip them:

use 5.026;
my $something = <<~'HERE';
    =head1 Ignore me

    This doesn't look like pod to perldoc anymore.

        $var = 'foo'; # you can still indent things

    =cut

    HERE
print $something;
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Perl determines how much whitespace to remove by the indent of the end-of-heredoc marker ("HERE" in the example).