It does sort of look that way, doesn't it?

No, it doesn't look that way, it is that way. I was pretty sure he meant that there was an array reference at that key, but trying to point out that the actual syntax of his "example" was something completely different (that is, calling a coderef stored in the hash).

Incidentally, your two examples can be written as ($value1, $value2) = $ref->{$key}->() and ($value1, $value2) = @{ $ref->{$key}->() }, which I find more readable.