Which is kinda useless if you're trying to pass this reference into a function.

Well, if you're trying to pass a reference into a function and also have it be the name of an argument, yes.

I wonder if you mean to pass a named parameter having a value that is a reference? Now, that seems to work pretty much as advertised:

>perl -wMstrict -MData::Dumper -le
"sub func {
   my %args = %{ $_[0] };
   print Dumper \%args;
   print $args{foo}->{bar};
   }
 func({ foo => { bar => 'baz' } });
"
$VAR1 = {
          'foo' => {
                     'bar' => 'baz'
                   }
        };

baz
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