That implies it has a secondary context. It doesn't.

Yes, of course - I was a little sloppy with my language.

And what's being assigned to @x is not the return value of x(), but the return value of the assignment operation, which is an lvalue itself.

What is assigned to @x, is the result of the rvalue expression. And that, is the result of the assignment to lvalue returned by the subroutine.

Yes, I think we're both saying the same thing here.