I think what isn't clear is what you are doing with the blessed hashref to your object itself. To wit, if your object (the one your original post referred to) were an Xyz, then into what kind of variable are you putting the return from Xyz::new()?

    my $xyz = new Xyz();
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Or,

   $XYZ = new xyz();     # where $XYZ is a package global
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If you are using the latter (for example in a test harness program), you might want to test the former to see if it exhibits the same behavior you originally asked about.