Yes, in part because it's taken so long and delivered so little and in part because Perl 5's core development picked back up again a few years ago (and the CPAN never stopped improving).

Is the Perl 6 language a dead end or are people enthusiastically working on using it for production systems?

The intent of the people working on it is to produce something which will eventually be usable for serious projects, but no one can give a good prediction as to when that will happen.