> The web was objectively awful as a technology, and genuinely amazing, and nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow aesthetically delightful.

As an old school Perl coder, not true. Lots of people had a taste for Perl. TIMTOWTDI was sold as an actual advantage.

Perl caters to things almost nobody else does, like the way you have a negative "if" in "unless" and placing conditions after the code. So you can do things like:

    frobnicate() unless ($skip_frobnicating);

     if (!$skip_frobnicating) frobnicate();

The bigger problem with Perl IMO is that it started as a great idea and didn't evolve far enough -- a bunch of things had to be tacked on, and everyone tacked on them slightly differently for no real benefit, resulting in codebases that can be terribly fragile for no good reason and no benefit.