Utf8mb4 problems when using DBD-MariaDB with Amavis

I was hoping to use the perl-DBD-MariaDB driver with Amavis on Centos 8 to work around the data typing bug here: #7

Everything works fine except that there are utf8mb4 encoding problems on the subject line when using the DBD-MariaDB driver. I had opened a ticket with DBD-MariaDB but they said that the problem is with Amavis not the DBD-MariaDB driver: https://github.com/gooddata/DBD-MariaDB/issues/159

I showed the Amavis insert code to one of the DBD-MariaDB developers and he said:

Instead of converting to octets, if you run utf8::upgrade $chars (operates in place) that should ensure that character string is interpreted correctly by both drivers.

Just trying to find a working solution to getting Amavis working on Centos 8 as the perl-DBD-mysql driver is broken with Amavis and it looks like the package maintainer doesn't want to fix it.