You are trying to use symbolic references which are forbidden under strict refs

In most cases it's better to just use hash values.

hash slices make this easy:

my %time;
@time{ qw(sec min hour ...) } = localtime(time);
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Edit

or

my %time;
my @pad = qw (sec min hour day month);
@time{ @pad } = localtime(time);
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Please note how this is more DRY than your redundant code.

The reason why symbolic references are deactivated by default "strictness" is that they result in very hard to spot errors.°

If you really need this kind of meta programming, you can still reactivate it with no strict 'refs' within the local scope.¹

Update

And to why it doesn't work with private lexicals, I suppose it has to do with the history of Perl 4 to 5, the former didn't have strict or lexical vars.

°) Especially people inexperienced to hashes are prone to this.

FWIW: I've seen languages where this was the only way to emulate hashes, but Perl is not one of them.

¹) though you can already do all of this with %package:: stash or PadWalker or eval constructs