Perl being so old means it's extremely fast for what it's designed to do, process streams or pipes. In a few tasks, it's faster than C, but being much faster to create a script or program that is useful, and with the implicit syntactic sugar, and since it's so flexible, you can just do things in the one way you know how and that's usually good enough.

Python is pretty good too for this and because modern computers are so fast it doesn't matter that it's much slower than perl, but if you're doing something like processing terabytes of files, it's probably worth your time to find or vibe code a one-liner in perl and torture it into working for your task.

Perl is amazing when it comes to regular expressions too. It's one of the reasons why perl is way more fun to write than Python. I still use perl for regex heavy tasks. I wish that python had integrated regex into the language the same way.