It sounds like Perl just wasn't your style and that's okay.

But, Perl was immensely popular, particularly in the 1990s in its 4.x/5.x days. We used it because it was precisely more elegant, ergonomic and performant than awk :-)

Later on, Python gained more traction because it was more batteries-included, and PHP evolved from being a toy named "Personal Home Page".

Perl was immensely popular, but it isn't necessarily enough to qualify for the personal "bubble" of languages one learns. It was a good choice of proven, general purpose interpreted scripting language for you in a time when Perl competed with AWK and shell scripts, but in the 1990s I used mainly C and C++ before adopting Java quite early and almost exclusively; when I later decided to learn some proven, general purpose interpreted scripting language Python was my obvious choice: more advanced than Perl 5 and more popular than Ruby.