Nice post! At my most recent job, we used perl daily for processing scripts and many other functions. After initially having similar thoughts about it being "obsolete" and a "dinosaur", I quickly realized how resilient and flexible the language is (I know the flexibility can come with some criticism).

We investigated a lot of other options (go & python specifically) when building new projects, but found that perl was the best solution. It's flexibility allowed us to develop a custom and durable solution that surpassed our expectations.

We ran into some environment/portability issues and resorted to using docker, carton, and gitlab CI to solve these problems. It is incredible how reliable and easy it became to modify and deploy code to a variety of systems (new or old).