I love Perl. I think, though, that the crazy mix of sigils and braces/brackets to work with complex data structures was one of the main reasons.

Especially for the type of users were Perl had gained some ground in the past...data science, DNA related stuff, etc. Non programmers.

If you look at just about any other language and how you would pull data in and out of json yaml, manipulate individual elements, etc... the Perl is just hard to decipher if you don't have immediate recall of all the crazy syntax for dereferencing things.