I learned and used Perl professionally from around 2005-2015 and experienced first-hand the ossification, fear of change, and lack of innovation in Perl 5 development. It seems all the talent and effort started being wasted on making Perl 6 the bestest, most elegant, most useful programming language in the world. Just seeing the neglect of Perl 5 kept me from ever considering Perl 6 and motivated me to move to other languages.

I started learn Perl 5 right before 6 was announced. When I saw what was happening with Perl 6, I decided just to stick with sh, awk and friends.

IIRC, The Perl 6 development thing went on for a very long time and got nothing but bad press. That took the wind out of my sails.