Not to mention that trying to understand existing Perl by asking the community 'what does this do' or 'how does this work' often (in my experience) resulted in 'RTFM' or 'man perldoc' rather than someone taking any time to actually answer the question, whereas other communities were more welcoming and helpful to each other. That made it difficult to learn Perl through other people's code compared to other languages.

I think that depended on where you were looking and how you were asking.

My main source of support back when I did much Perl (late 90s, early 00s) was usenet, and while some groups were very snubby and elitist others were very helpful and encouraging for a young budding programmer.

I had the complete opposite experience. Perlmonks and irc were amazing resources for a budding developer.