Putting that result in @{} will force it back into a list context

The @{} dereferences the reference to an array regardless of context. Also, if it was list context then shouldn't @{} return the last element of the array in scalar context? Observe:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wl
use strict;

sub list {
  return qw(a b c); # real list
}

my $a_ref = [qw(a b c)];

$, = $";

print "list", @{$a_ref};
print "list", list();
print "scalar " . @{$a_ref};
print "scalar " . list();

__END__
list a b c
list a b c
scalar 3
scalar c
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An arrayref dereferences to an array, not a list. Sure, they're similar but they don't behave the same.