There's so much I can write here, not only do I agree with you - there remains little better for processing streams of text than perl.

Even PHPs prominence (and ease of use) can be traced back to the parts it borrows from Perl; since the web is just manipulating text after all.

I went on a similar journey to you. Started with C, moved to bash, then to perl to replace bash scripts, and you're right that it feels like a super power.

But the most interesting language I've ever coded in was probably Ruby, because it changed the way I look at languages. In Ruby, everything is an object and everything is mutable - this makes the dynamic metascripting possibilities simply absurd.

I don't advocate for these languages anymore, as Perl is easy to become "write once, read never", in a way that's much worse than bash- but I can't help but feel like we have definitely lost a killer language for text processing. Seemingly nobody writes perl anymore.