I agree, and the blame for its weirdness can be laid directly at Larry Wall's feet, because Wall
wanted a language that allowed for cleverness, suprise, and ingenuity. He was never happier than when someone would come up with a completely new way to do something. For Wall, programming was less about coding an outcome, than it was about speaking a particular language (and ideally, writing poetry in it). And it was very successful in this way, and fit reasonably well with the high-knowledge users/environment of unix in the 90s.
It's just that Wall's vision was incompatible with general purpose languages used widely by a wide range of knowledge and skill amongst its users, and as unix/linux opened up to that wider range, better general purpose alternatives were chosen. Having to learn to be a poet to be a good coder was too high a barrier.