I've continued to be productive by writing applications, microservices, and websites in Perl. Though these days it seems few people care to hear about the details as it isn't the flavour of the day.
Mojolicious is cool, although I've usually stuck with Dancer instead (which is itself a clone of Ruby's sinatra).
Module growth is strong, and accelerating.
Not quite the hallmarks of something going the way of COBOL.
Note also that Fortran is also in heavy use in various science fields. Rumors of its impending death have also been greatly exaggerated.
Yeah, sure, hire a Ruby/Python programmer ... and try to trick them about the language they're going to be using by being vague about it in the job posting and initial conversations until they got really interested?
Been there, done that. It was a stopgap measure that sort of worked and it wasn't that much fun.
Hire for good programmers, and they'll be good Perl programmers if they need to be.