There are new versions of DBD::Pg available (most current is 3.5.3). To make use of them requires minor changes to the server: The new DBD::Pg returns properly decoded UTF-8 strings for all data types except bytea, while it previously only did so for (var)char and text. This means that we can (must) stop doing the decoding ourselves for jsonb columns.

Note that DBD::Pg version 2 will stop working with these changes, while DBD::Pg version 3 will only work with them; so the updates need to happen at the same time.