The great displacement is already well underway?

PHP is his only language, right? He's in the same situation as Perl-only developers a couple of decades ago.

Perl also destroyed itself by growing an arrogant community that would eagerly race to be the first to shout "RTFM" at a modest inquiry by someone new to the language.

That was not my experience (at least with perlmonks) back when I used Perl, but maybe I'm mis-remembering things.

I think part of Perl's downfall was that TMTOWTDI became too many ways to do one thing, and it was too easy to create terse, unreadable code. Basically, the opposite direction of modern concepts like "idiomatic Go".

I'm sad that Perl is dying while people are still writing fucking bash scripts in production code. (Perl is still better than that!)

Perl was great! But perl came and went.

Shell scripts are forever. So far.