About the newlines and chomp, you should probably should be trimming.

sub trim(_) { $_[0] =~ s/^\s+|\s++\z//rg }

my $severity = trim $xp->find('./severity', $node);

my $remedyqueue_xpath = "...";
my $remedyqueue = [
   map trim,
      $xp->find($remedyqueue_xpath)->get_nodelist()
];
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