Perl, I really dislike. I suspect this is for the same reason I can't stand vim and very rarely use keyboard shortcuts for anything: I thoroughly detest learning anything by rote memorisation. My brain just doesn't work that way.
There's More Than One Way To Do It is anathema to my style of thinking. To read other people's code, I'd either need to remember all the ways, or else have the docs open permanently. Neither is a palatable option.
However, I respect Perl. As a tool for text manipulation, including constructing pipelines from command line tools originally designed for human interaction, it is still unparalleled.
And it's good enough as a general purpose language, that people have built quite sophisticated tools with it, that perform the job as requested.
Not only that, but the success of CPAN is still the gold standard for language specific distribution archives.