How else would you (recommend) check for passed arguments to be present if this does not work?

I would either pass the content of @ARGV or a reference to it myself:

use strict;
use warnings;

mysub1(@ARGV);

mysub2(\@ARGV);

exit(0);

sub mysub1 {
    my @args = @_;

    print "There were " . scalar(@args) . " arguments: @args\n";
}


sub mysub2 {
    my ($args) = @_;

    print "There were " . scalar(@$args) . " arguments: @$args\n";
}
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