Perl's decline was cultural

But isn't this everything? All of computing is a struggle for me at least, all followed with confusion and "Why did they make this, this way?"

But is it all equally a struggle? Some things are definitely more of a struggle than others. Remember xfree86config? We used to have to manually configure our screen resolution in a shitty text file. I even remembered that you had to specifically add a line to tell it you had a 3 button mouse. This was in the late 90s, maybe early 00s. Way after it was sane to have to do that.

And I specifically remember when they fixed it there really were some people who pushed back against the change. Kind of unbelievable but it's true. I guess psychologically they felt that it was unfair that they had to struggle and future people wouldn't have to. But they couldn't just say that so they came up with nonsense technical objections.

One of those many cases where X = X.

I didn't have this experience when I first learned C#. Everything just kind of worked the way I expected it to. There are sharp edges, but far fewer than expected and always for an actual reason.