"I generally don't code object type code"

But that's not the point. Same rule applies here, which has nothing to do with OO:

use Data::Dumper;

use strict;
use warnings;

my $dat = do_this();
print Dumper($dat);

sub do_this {  
    my %dat = ("a", 1, "b", 2);
    return \%dat;    
}
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