In fairness, Perl died because it was just not a good language compared to others that popped up after its peak. Sometimes people just move to the better option.
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Thing is, it worked great for ME but when I started interacting with other people's perl code, it all broke down.
One person would write it all on one line. Another would be extra verbose. Some would use all the idioms, others would be 10 levels of nested braces.
Every person's brain expressed itself differently and it was much harder to find common ground.
Eventually I left perl for python, which seemed to be more sane. It seemed pythonic was more of a thing and the code was more readable. Also, it had a large standard library and you didn't have to leave the language to solve just about any problem. It did require extra effort to write code, but the benefits were pretty obvious.
A couple other sort of random points - perl 6 was delayed and that might have hurt the language. Just the same python 3 did come out, but the 2 to 3 changeover was a huge negative to the language.