Great point! Confluence of simultaneous factors.

PERL tripped over it's own feet (too clever, line-noise, unmaintainable).

Java(TM) being "guaranteed to be business-like" sucked the serious use cases away.

PHP was easier to grok, had "editable man pages" (ie: comment forum attached to each built-in), and didn't have "slow CGI overhead" or "FastCGI complexity".

Python was waaaay easier to read/write/maintain, and was a serious alternative (except for trickier process-control integration, you couldn't just "$XYZ = `ls -al`" like you could in perl).

...and then "PERL6 will be gloriously filled with rainbows, butterflies, will be backwards incompatible, and will be released Any Day Now(tm)" sucked alll the oxygen out of a developer investing in perl.

By the time nodejs became another contender for server-side languages, there was no place for PERL as it's effectively become kindof a COBOL for unix systems. Don't touch it if you can avoid it, and it requires expensive, difficult-to-find specialists to maintain it if you need to.