You cannot use ~~ to match a given string with an array of patterns.

Yes you can. From perlsyn of 5.10.1, 5.12.0 and 5.12.2, the first matching case is

Any ~~ Array
match against an array element
grep $a ~~ $_, @$b
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which repeatedly does

Any ~~ Regex
pattern match
$a =~ /$b/
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Example:

use feature qw( say );

my @pats = map qr/$_/, qw( a c );

for (qw( aaa bbb ccc ddd )) {
   say if $_ ~~ @pats;
}
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aaa
ccc
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I didn't check the 5.10.0 docs since smart matching underwent major fixes in 5.10.1.