it looks like qw() has some magic in it in recent versions
If you mean with "recent" any formal releases in years starting with '2', then yes.

This has worked ever since 5.6.0 - which was the version that started doing qw at compile time, turning qw[foo bar] into ('foo', 'bar'). With parens. Probably most often seen in: 

foreach my $qw qw (qw qw) {print $qw}

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In reply to Re^4: $obj->method v.s. $obj->method() by JavaFan
in thread $obj->method v.s. $obj->method() by perl5ever

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