In all seriousness mod_php killed Perl, or at least struck the fatal blow. In the late 90s I wanted to make dynamic web content, just simple CRUD stuff. The most reliable way to do this was Perl. As long as your hash bang and permissions were correct you could drop a script in a cgi-bin directory and it would work. It didn't matter if the server was Solaris, Linux, or some other Unix. Most hosts that supported Perl also at least had the CGI module installed as well.

It was worth fighting with Perl's syntax because it was the best option for web programming (for random amateurs like myself). Web hosts often didn't have C compilers available so C wasn't an option. TCL was workable but not as prevalent as Perl on web hosts. Same with PHP3. Keep in mind this was an era where you were deploying on machines you didn't on which you didn't have admin access. Most of the time you didn't have shell access on machines you'd deploy on.

As Linux adoption on servers exploded so did the deployment of PHP. It was easy to deploy PHP web apps since they could be readily dropped in your htdocs or public_html directory and be handled by the server. Enabling other CGI outside cgi-bin directories was uncommon.

So by 2000 or so there was no reason to learn Perl to do web stuff easily. You could do it in PHP which was already a templating language. The younger version of me that wanted to do web CRUD stuff bought a PHP book instead of a Perl book. With Python 2's release at that same time if you wanted to do portable non-web stuff you had a much nicer language than Perl available as well.