Again: python syntax is more akin to what you are used to, and so it feels more comfortable to you.

$_ is inscrutable if you haven't studied perl, but the same thing would happen to anyone who sees a python decorator for the first time. what does "else: do after a while loop in python? Only people who know python know what it does (and I suspect most don't). The different quoting operators are also trivial to learn. In comparison, yield from python is also simple syntax but the semantics are much more involved.

BEGIN? Take 60 seconds to read what it means. And if you knew awk, you'd not have to do that, as it was directly lifted from awk.

Given python’s love for string-leading sigils, the previous commenter should be quite comfortable with the idea of obscure single-letter operators that dictate the interpretation of the following tokens.