It is a real general-purpose programming language, not a "scripting" language. Did you ever have a look at it?
TBH, prior to perl6, perl was such a horrid inconsistent mess, it reeked of shell.
I wonder if there was an earlier point of Perl's demise. Perl 5 came out with flexible object-oriented features, but it took years for packages like Moose to come out and make it nice and usable.
But the bad side was that by the time someone was clever enough to invent Moose, all sorts of other bespoke object systems had been invented and used in the meantime, and your CPAN dependencies used every single one of them.