The only other idea I have uses a list reference and a hash slice with bind_columns. I haven't tested this with DBI, but I did test it standalone.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my %h;
my @cols = qw( one two three four );
@h{@cols} = ( 1 .. 4 );

assign( \( @h{ @cols } ) );
print "$_ => $h{$_}\n" foreach @cols;

sub assign {
    my $val = 0;
    foreach (@_) {
        $$_ = $val++;
    }
}
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There. You name your variables only once (outside of the template section), bind them to columns for speed, and are able to access them via a hash lookup. No symbolic references, and the only ugly construct is making a list of references from a hash slice. That beats the map stuff in my book, and it looks like a spaceship. You can't go wrong there.