That same feeling of carefree playfulness is also the reason I keep meaning to give Raku a visit. They're pretty explicit about it even with pages like https://raku.org/fun/ and https://raku.org/whatever/. It looks like they've done some interesting stuff around making text-based command line tools really easy to work with, which makes sense since that was a huge part of perl5's wheelhouse, so I think that may be a good place to start digging into Raku.