Yes, if my $count{'abc'}; made sense, that could be an expected result. He had my $count{'abc'} = 0;, though, which is why he's expecting a different result.

This is how I understand how autovivification works.

autovivification is the automatic creation of variables when they are needed.

No part of the OP's file contains code that uses %count (just $count), so it's never needed, so autovivification has nothing to do with the OP's problem.