In today's topography, these dependencies drive the use case more times than not. Something like 'As a clerical manager I want IT to take an old nightly file (proprietary fmt) and transform it to CSV and put it onto our S3 drive so that we can get the data into our EDW staging area.'

If Perl can only get the transformation piece where another language gets you to the last part then there is less reason to use Perl at all. That was Perl's bread and butter. It was the king of data transformation. It was even used (is used) to prototype data conversion from COBOL to xml. I've even seen it parsing COBOL code for keyword highlighting and hosting a website to view the results.

I could easily write that in SCALA today in a one stop shop, arguably faster.

Perl isn't dead but its not exactly alive. And let's face it, it isn't really being taught in schools anymore. It and PHP were when I was in college. Can any language fall to this fate? Sure, but if you stick with Java/Scala/Kotlin, Javascript/Typescript/Node and .Net/C#/F# you are pretty safe for a decade or two. Perl is just the weeds in the garden at this point.