Yes! There was a lesson in that and we all missed it. That was probably one of the failings of perl. It ran into a generation of people who never knew about "man pages", or couldn't read (jk - but only somewhat: for some people reading is very hard because various flavors of ADHD, dyslexia, executive disfunction, whatever) and the man page is then useless, or they go to google first and '$|++' failed (because google was raised on python).
Better marketing of the documentation would have helped.
I would say "we'll do better next time" but then perl 6... I'm not happy with perl 6 documentation. There is a lot of it - no problem there. But it insists on living online which necessitates a hosted search function. Which is always broken. And there is still no "local doc" solution.