Perl's decline was cultural

Perl's "decline" saved it from a fate worst than death: popularity and splitting into dozens of incompatible versions from added/removed features (like python). Instead Perl is just available everywhere in the same stable form. Scripts always can just use the system perl interpreter. And most of the time a script written in $currentyear can run just as well on a perl system interpreter from 2 decades ago (and vice versa). It is the perfect language for system adminstration and personal use. Even if it isn't for machine learning and those kinds of bleeding edge things that need constant major changes. There are trade-offs.

This kind of ubiquitous availablility (from early popularity) combined with the huge drop-off in popularity due to raku/etc, lead to a unique and very valuable situation unmatched by any other comparable language. Perl just works everywhere. No containers, no dep hell, no specific versions of the language needed. Perl is Perl and it does what it always has reliably.

I love it. The decline was a savior.

In fairness, Perl died because it was just not a good language compared to others that popped up after its peak. Sometimes people just move to the better option.

I think a big part is does someone starting to program even hear that Perl exists? No, and they start learning python and so have little need to learn Perl after that

I always found the Perl "community" to be really off-putting with all the monk and wizard nonsense. Then there was the whole one-liner thing that was all about being clever and obscure. Everything about Python came off as being much more serious and normal for a young nerd who wasn't a theater kid.

Perl was (and still is) a very expressive and concise language for working with text and a unix-style system. It exists in the odd space between a shell language and a general purpose language.

But, shell scripting has already become somewhat of an arcane skill. I think the article nailed that Perl was just too hard to learn for the value it provided to survive. Python is not nearly as, erm, expressive as perl for working in that space, but it is much easier to learn, both in terms of reading and writing. In other words, it encourages broadly maintainable code. Ruby is quite similar (although I think people massively overstate how much the language itself generally encourages understandable semantics)