You indeed ran into toxic environments. I don't feel that the common, new perl programmer intake path was anything like that. Not what I ever ran into.

Support in forums and such was needlessly short in using RTFM as an answer. People could have pasted a one paragraph pointer to the documentation intake path and that would have helped.

It was EFnet/#perl which included most of the core development team. I don’t really have experience with the non-core social environment, sorry.