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Even now I start web-projects with Perl.

It's not "cool", it's not "sexy", but there package collection (http://cpan.org/) is __huge__.

I find it unlikely that new people will suddenly rediscover perl, in the golang/node.js/python-centric state the world is in. But the people who love it, do continue to love it, and do continue to do useful and essential things with it.

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The CPAN argument for choosing Perl was relevant about 10 years ago but if you look at http://modulecounts.com you'll find Ruby, Python, PHP, JS and Java have an order of magnitude more libraries to choose from. CPAN is not __huge__ by today's standards. Drupal alone has the same number of modules. The declining community also means many of the libraries on CPAN are unlikely to be maintained.

Yes, "stableperl" maintains a small number of backported bugfixes to Perl 5.22: http://blog.schmorp.de/2015-06-06-a-stable-perl.html

The author cites a couple of issues as the motivation behind the release.

Hum, depends upon your definition of what's a module. from cpan.org front page:

The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) currently has 186,953 Perl modules in 35,278 distributions, written by 13,095 authors, mirrored on 248 servers.

CPAN has never failed me. I love it.

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