It's either a bug of a feature in your code depending on your intent. Perl allows the use of symbolic references in that fashion unless you use strict as you found. Symbolic references are generally considered evil and there are almost always other ways of achieving the same effect.

So, yes it is a feature of Perl. It does have to do with "use strict refs". Symbolic references are generally a good thing to avoid and strict is always a good thing to use by default.