Perl did a lot of things right a long time ago. For me a few of the big ones arent technical-- CPAN as you mentioned, was the most useful repository of any programming community. Another one for me is that Perl documentation has conventions and one of those conventions is a tiny "synopsis" at the top of each page that shows actual code using the thing that page is describing. I dont think people understand how much this has helped-- and its been that way for 20 years. Of course, in Java to show how any simple library works you'd have to show the contents of at least 8 separate files but hey- who's fault is that? ;)

Now that I think about it, the documentation in general (in Perl) was light years ahead of its time. perldoc, the included documentation is pretty comprehensive. The camel book came out when a lot of hacker news readers were a twinkle their father's eye. Perl was a big part of Oreilly's good ole days and it set Perl apart as a community that had really good accessible books available that werent CS textbooks but also werent "Learn how to programmer in 24 minutes".

I dont use Perl much these days. Most of my peers are afraid of Perl or were told to hate Perl. They dont know much about it other than when to laugh at a Perl 6 joke. A few point out that python has come of age and greatly out performs Perl. Still, there will always be plenty of perl in ~/bin.