Symbolic references are very useful in some situations, you just have to be aware of not introducing bugs in your code while using them.

Be aware that only package (global) variables are visible to symbolic references, and the use of global variables is error-prone.

Also, the use of symbolic references results in a warning, you have to use no warnings 'ref' to avoid it, so be sure to deactivate them only in the innermost block of code where the symbolic reference is used

That said, your code uses the symbolic reference on global variables and you are not using strict and you are not using warnings at all, so probably, you will not be bother by introducing a new error-prone feature