I think this is mostly the correct take. Perl's strength is that it was really good and quick and dirty one-offs, especially with text manipulation. This made it particularly popular with UNIX sysadmins and sometimes network admins. This was helped by the fact that CPAN made it easy to share a lot of these, which added to its popularity (it can't be overstated how revolutionary CPAN was).

The 1980s/1990s was full of many different data formats in a time before XML/JSON, often by long dead companies. Many a tech person was in a situation where "Oh fuck, how do I get this data out of some obscure database from some dead company from Boston that only ran on SCO UNIX into SAP/Oracle/etc" only to see somebody else already done it and made a CPAN module.

But stories like that became less common as DBs converged into a few players.

Yeah i'll say, even to this day, when I need a quick script and bash just isn't doing it for me I'll just write it in the same perl I used regularly as far back as 1998... but it never goes further than that. If I have to take that script and build it into anything that will ever leave my laptop it's going to get rewritten in something else (probably golang since it is universal on my team).

> quick and dirty one-offs,

Then used for huge GUI apps that run slow like a wet week, unreliably

The same thing is happening with Python.