> the lack of function arguments (I know that this has changed recently)

Real arguments were added as of perl 5.20, which was in 2014.

Yes, that's almost as old as some currently-hyped programming languages. But it's quite new compared to the natural behaviour of some developers (a fact that I used to find surprising and now just find disappointing).

Comparably: today, in the Python world, people are praising tools like uv because now they "don't have to understand virtual environments". And continuously since the introduction of PEP 668 three years ago, people have been grumbling about the expectation to leave "externally managed environments" alone. But uv still uses virtual environments; and `venv` has been in the standard library since 2012, and the third-party `virtualenv` that it's based on has been available since 2007.

That's "recently", relative to Perl's heyday.

As an experimental feature, with no guarantees it would remain in the language. It wasn't marked a stable feature until v5.36 (2022).

Sure, but perl was already dying by like 2005.