Perl rose to popularity because early web development was all about text processing (reading web forms and outputting HTML) and Perl made that easier (regex deluxe) than other choices on unix at the time. It became the lingua franca of web developers. Perl 5 made heavy use of symbols so it was visually noisy, and then Perl 6 came along and added even more magic meanings to other symbols, and that was a tipping point…
TL;DR; I would say that you assertion is context sensitive. - For a junior Perl programmer or an outside expert those symbols are stumbling blocks. - For an intermediate Perl programmer and up, those symbols are tools that make the code more readable and expressive.
I got two ways of looking at that. First, I would look at Perl in the context of language. It is a more context sensitive language than some of it's close competitors. When you understand those \ $ % @ & sigils you gain the ability to know at a glance the context in which data is being used. Understanding @_, $_, allows you to write shorter code without sacrificing meaning. Part of the Perl philosophy is TIMTOWTDI. Most of those special variables also have an English equivalent. Instead of using $) which I never remember I can use $EGID, or if I think that's not explicit enough then I can use $EFFECTIVE_GROUP_ID to really spell it out.
The second way is that Perl has a steeper learning curve than it's close competitors. I see this like comparing Vim to Notepad++ and Emacs, or Haskell to well most other functional programming languages. Just because it took longer to learn, that doesn't mean it's better or worse at creating good code. It does mean that armchair pundits are less likely to be correct in their hot takes. They lack experience and understanding.