I think that the alternative is better than yours for a pretty simple reason. With it, you don't need to find and edit out the dereference op for every use of the hash. Only one line of code needs to change.

 context
 context
-my %$h = ('name' => 'value', ...);
+my $h = {'name' => 'value', ...};
 context
 print $h->{'name'};
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