Yup, I think it's that, it's nice for perl users to find each other. Every second job I do seems to involve writing a lot of perl code. The release notes reminds me how much I still don't know about perl.
While it's disappointing that you don't get to use a newer perl at work, you should still be able to play with most of the shiny modules. There's plenty of CPAN authors still happy to do the legwork to make that so, because we don't want to exclude a bunch of people just because their perl5 VM sucks.