According to the Linux kernel documentation: "You will need perl 5 and the following modules: Getopt::Long, Getopt::Std, File::Basename, and File::Find to build the kernel."

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/2324d50d051ec0f14a548...

That was added 11 years ago(!!) so it may be out of date.

Not really. I created and maintained a Linux distribution, and while Perl was sometimes used it was almost never strictly required (i.e., it was for documentation or something that really would have been better if the release maintainer had already generated....). This covers a few hundred packages, like gcc, binutils, glibc, linux, core-utils, util-linux, flex, ...

Notable, also, is that I didn't compile perl for my Linux distribution because perl's configuration system is terrible (there's an out-of-tree patch to make it less terrible, though).

Nope, it's a combo of makefiles (GNU flavour I think) and C called Kconfig.

Not anymore