Perl's decline was cultural

No. Perl died because other languages starting having an equivalent to CPAN and its extremely flexible syntax does not scale for medium to large team coordination.

It does if you restrict flexibility, but one of the critical flaws in Perl culture was the belief in letting everyone evolve in different directions while cooperating. It’s a genuinely charming belief, but it’s also explicitly incompatible with ‘interchangeable parts’ employment, and tends to only work in an environment where every individual is the ‘wizard’ lord of their personal domain over code. Even if you managed to train everyone to parse Perl, the cognitive overhead of having to train everyone in each other’s syntactic decisions was O(2^n) expensive, which contrasted quite sharply with Python moving that expensive cognitive overhead to the Proposals system while the produced language had slow version updates and “What we argued about so you don’t have to retread the same ground at work every quarter” mission briefs.

Some of the reasons why I never bothered with Perl was that I had the perception that it, like Ruby, encouraged mutating and modifying classes on the fly, willy-nilly. And the lack of static typing. Python also did not have static typing (it has some optional typing now or something like it), but my perception was that monkeypatching was not abused as much in Python as it might be in Perl and Ruby. Not that I used Python a lot.