it was only after the community's rejection that the decision to continue perl5 happened.
The lack of any usable Perl 6 implementation by the time of Perl 5.12 did more to promote the continuation of Perl 5 as its own project than any specific rejection of Perl 6. When the plan was for Perl 6 to replace Perl 5, the idea that Perl 5.12 would migrate to Parrot as a VM so that Perl 5 and Perl 6 code could run in the same process.