Agreed. In grad school, I used Perl to script running my benchmarks, post-process my data and generate pretty graphs for papers. It was all Perl 5 and gnuplot. Once I saw someone do the same thing with Python and matplotlib, I never looked back. I later actually started using Python professionally, as I believe lots of other people had similar epiphanies. And not just from Perl, but from different languages and domains.
I think the article's author is implicitly not considering that people who were around when Perl was popular, who were perfectly capable of "understanding" it, actively decided against it.