When you get down to it, a perl namespace is just a string. It gets mapped into the symbol table by simple trickery involving string operations.

A class constructor method new() usually starts with,

sub new {
    my $class = shift;
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then goes on to generate some suitable $self, and ends with,

    bless $self, $class;
}
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which is typically all that's done with $class.

If you look at the docs for bless, you'll see that all it needs is a string in the second argument. There is nothing to prevent you from blessing a reference into any string you like:

perl -Mstrict -we'my $vanilla = bless {}, "Im a Pudding"; print ref $v
+anilla, $/'
Im a Pudding
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Of course that will fail to find any methods for $vanilla if you try to use them.

So you're doing the right thing. There are no reference or alias issues, and strict doesn't raise a peep.