Before Perl, there was no scripting language that could do systems tasks except maybe shell and tcl, but that's shell is an extremely unpleasant programming experience and the performance is horrid, and tcl's string-based nature is just too weird.
Perl gives you something more like a real programming language and can do shell-like tasks and systems tasks very nicely. Compared to what came before, it is amazing.
But then Ruby and Python came along and checked the "real programming language" box even more firmly than Perl while retaining the shell/systems angle. Ruby and Python were better than Perl along exactly the same axis as the one on which Perl was better than Tcl and shell.
TCL had the ability dynamically load and call into .so’s which was really powerful. Those who knew, knew.
It's both awesome and weird.
Some people use it effectively to this day. Most either have no idea about it, or know about it but can't get into the mindset (like me).