There are more CPAN authors than ever before. There are more CPAN uploads than ever before. I used to give out a couple commit bits a week to projects I'm involved in; now we've got half a dozen people with access to do that giving out at least one a week (and this in spite of the fact that we're getting at least that many new contributors through github as well).

Overall Perl use may have declined, but good, effective, maintainable Perl use by people who're involved in the community is on the rise - and that's the group that I'm a part of, the people who write Perl as a robust, team-oriented, scalable production language rather than the PERL scripters of old (and my thoughts go out to the PHP and ruby communities who seem to have acquired a similar breed of idiot this time round the hype mill).