I use shell, vim, sed all the time (awk less but i have used it). I've never used perl. I don't even know if i've ever even encountered a perl program that i wanted to look inside.

I think its just one of those things, they lost mindshare and people stopped making stuff in perl. Network effects made it snowball from there. How often do you see code examples written in perl? Almost never. I see people write blogs with code snippets in python, c, rust or even shell all the time. Never perl.

Momentum matters and perl lost it. I think of perl the same way i think of cobol or fortran.

You really think that Perl has billions of lines in active use in critical applications and libraries?