Wnatarray()s return is always the context of the call of the subroutine that it is in. Note also that wantarray always returns a scalar value (0, 1, undef)

What happens inside the subroutine that wantarray() is in is absolutely irrelevant to what wantarray() reports.

There are 3 contexts that a subroutine can be called in:

   blah();       # void
   $x = blah();  # scalar
   @x = blah();  # list
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Anything you can dream up that can be assigned into fits into one of those categories. But dont trick yourself into thinking something like this will try a list assignment:

   my $x = [];  # $x is now an (empty) arrayref

   $x = blah(); # $x is a scalar - wantarray reports 0
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So, even though $x is an arrayref, an arrayref is NOT a list, its a scalar. A reference to be specific.