Perl was of a time, so it's important to remember when it was around. CPAN was legitimately one of the first package managers for a programming language that WORKED. Contextually, its references are bash, sed, awk, and other cli tools. There are too many ways to do things in perl because of the various flavors / takes on how to do things. It was also a fun way to write cgi apps in the era of C/C++. Is that the best way to do things today? No! It was one way to do something complex in few lines of code. It was the python of its day in many ways.

There are tons of quirks that are interesting that influenced language development today, for me the spaceship operator "<=>" was a fun one. You can have a flip through the camel book to see what kind of stunts were common in its era.

It is an auteur language that was not really done the way languages are today.

Perl 6 did massive damage to the community mainly because it was so different that it looked like a fantasy language. That along with Parrot really lost the plot for me, I had mostly stopped doing that kind of work and moved on to R for my bioinformatics things. Bioconductor was the bees knees.

I'm surprised at all the haterade, probably you're either <30, and/or being overly critical of a very nascent tech era. Perl was pre and post .bomb, and had one of the first online communities that I remember that shared tips and tricks at scale at perlmonks.org. It predated stackoverflow! It was a very different time to now.

This was also from a time when people still paid for compilers(!)

I am deeply biased, as I wrote a 3d distance calculator in Perl for small molecule drugs. We were looking for disulfiram analogs doing biopanning and then simulations. There was a great PDB library for structures at that time that saved me tons of time. This was circa 2005~, ages from now.