> Also, even if Perl 6 had never happened the way it did and instead we'd just had smaller evolutions of the language in major versions, I think usage would still have shrunk over time.

Maybe. I mean the whole point of 6 was to modernize perl.

Perl needed efforts like 6 to happen, but it needed them delivered in smaller chunks over the years rather than as a big decade long "And now 6 is here".

Java learned this lesson after Java 8 and 9 which took multi-year effort to deliver 1 or 2 big changes to the language and the JVM. Now Java has multiple efforts in flight which have trickled in over the years (tickling me as a dev). Every 6 month release is a little better which makes the multi-year efforts seem all that much more worth it when they land.