For a tiny bit of help, you can omit the arrows between braces.

I'm not clear on what problem you're having in using a ref for initialization. Could you amend your post to include a few lines of your initialization code? It's certainly possible to do something like

my $this_level = $project{$activeProject}{components}{"Software"}{subC
+omponents}{"Database"};
$this_level->{label} = 'Test-1.01';
$this_level->{some_other_tag} = 'You passed';
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