in reply to
Re^2: no strict refs for blocks?
in thread no strict refs for blocks?
but the additional "use strict refs" is a NOOP.
Actually, it would reenable strict for any code below in the remainder of the block. Here it is indeed not doing anything. Probably the person who wrote this snippet copy/pasted it from somewhere else without knowing why the "use strict" was there (typically known in the Perl world as "cargo culting"); or else, there might have been some code below it, which got deleted, and this just stuck.