in reply to converting from string to SCALAR when using strict "refs"
I suspect that you won't be happy to get what you're asking for. If you really do use the string "0" as a scalar ref, you'll be accessing the variable, $0, and I'm not sure why you'd want to do that via reference. So I'm calling XY Problem.
Can you show us more of the code that's having the problem? It would help if you can come up with a minimum snippet that shows the problem.
If you want to turn off strictures for only a small place you can do that in a scope like so.
{ no strict 'refs'; print ${$zero}; }
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