From a recruiter’s perspective, I remember recruiting full stack Perl people for a San Jose based tech company in 2010. I was able to secure one really good Perl guy who had just been laid off from Yahoo, but there just wasn’t anyone else who was relatively easy to find with the experience this company wanted. I was charging by the hour, and I distinctly remember suggesting that the company consider hiring non-Perl people and letting them learn on the job as I wasn’t going to be able to find what they wanted. They kept looking for Perl people and I kept charging them. I wasn’t shocked when an executive at the company eventually asked why the recruiting bill was so high given the lack of results.

I interviewed for Yahoo Mail in '05 - multiple rounds and they ghosted me. IIRC, it was all going to be perl stuff.. I'd done some out of necessity a few years earlier, and hated it.

In hindsight, glad they didn't respond - got a much nicer EDA startup job a month later working with Tcl/Tk (which I had already used for ~10 years at the time).