> Where do the angle brackets come in?

The angle brackets are syntactic sugar for word quoting.

    <a b c>

is syntactic sugar for:

    ("a", "b", "c")

They can be used standalone. Or as postcircumfix on hashes:

    %foo<a>      # the value of key "a" in hash %foo
    %foo<a b c>  # the values of keys "a", "b", "c" in hash %foo

There's a lot more to it than that, but that's the gist of it.

https://docs.raku.org/language/quoting#Word_quoting:_%3C_%3E