Perl is just C with less type safety.

And yes, for the most part. C++ as simple shorthand for struct-attached functions and automatic memory management (no, not smart pointers; RAAI) is good. Every single thing added after that is misery and should push a modern developer to Rust, Go, or Zig (roughly in that order) where such things are implemented sanely or not at all.

Funny I think of Perl as Bash with slightly saner syntax plus robust regexp. (said with love)

The only thing Perl and C have in common is the curly-brace.