The number of people willing to brave hacking in Perl seems to have fallen off a cliff - for good reason - so it’s a weird choice of example.
I've personally fixed an early noughties Perl script where one of the modules it used had changed its name (but thankfully not the interface, not significantly at least), among a couple of other compat problems. Fixing it turned out pretty straightforward even for someone who's far from a greybeard Perl "hacker".
A big part of the problem wasn't that you couldn't write good code with Perl, but that there were too many ways to write bad code with it. That made it anathema for any sort of corporate development, which is the main driver of programming language progress.