Read Arrays are not lists and Scalars, Lists, and Arrays and repeat to yourself three times - "('foo', 'bar', 'baz') is not an array" ;-)

I'm with Abigail-II. The \ operator has lots of weird cases that surprise you. For example:

\@foo       # reference to array @foo
\(@foo, $a) # list of reference to array @foo and scalar $a
\(@foo)     # list of references to contents of @foo
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