I think you really need to add

use vars qw($footer);
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to your main program. Because strictness is lexically scoped, it won't apply to vars.pl anyway, so it's not a problem there.

Then you can use the package variable $footer from the main program. Another possibility is to put an explicit package declaration into vars.pl (but don't use package vars; because that name is used by the use vars pragma.)

  package Vars;
  $footer = qw(...);
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then you can require vars.pl, and refer to the footer as $Vars::footer from your main script.