I don’t know about the wider Perl community, but I listened to some interviews from Larry Wall and he just came across as a nerdy guy having fun with what he’s doing. I quite liked listening to him.

Larry should be remembered for the development of "patch" more than perl. Without the concept of fuzzily applying patches to modified source files you can't have "git rebase" or "git merge".

I was never a perl programmer, but this was my impression of basically every perl programmer I have interacted with.

Also, I think Larry Wall's "Diligence, Patience, Humility"[0] is among my favourite articles about programming.

[0] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/larry.html

Individuals are rarely (not never, but rarely) the full problem. Groups of people are what cause feedback loops and cultural reinforcement like the author describes. Sometimes this is a virtuous reinforcement cycle but more often than not the well gets poisoned over time.

My anecdotal experience was with perl guys who were ex-military, irreverent, and fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants. The Java and .NET guys were straight laced and nerdy.