For moderately advanced text processing with regular expressions, supposedly its strong point, it was far less elegant and concise than AWK at the low end and far less readable and less batteries-included than Python for more complex tasks involving some integration.
For dynamic web pages, another of the main uses of Perl, PHP was purposefully designed and (while not really good) practical and user-friendly, with plenty of other obviously more robust and serious options (Ruby, Java, later Python, etc.) for more enterprise projects.