Why are you ignoring the entire section of my original post starting with "To be specific about the problem ..."???

First, that's not true. I addressed that.

Second, I don't happen to be interested in helping you work around a bug when it's easy to fix the bug itself.

I'm not looking to encode an arbitrary shell command.

That's not true, you're trying to make it work with Perl and argcount.

If it's limited to Perl, there are indeed ways.

perl -MDecoder -edecode_and_run encoded
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