When you quoted someone saying "how Perl managed to become quite so profoundly disliked" and said "the conspicuous reasons seem to be a combination of: 1) PERL's usage of sigils," I took that to mean you were saying that sigils were a major reason that Perl isn't well-liked by as many people anymore. I'm sorry if that was a misunderstanding.
> Because special non-obvious symbols that "don't explain themselves" are perceived as terse.
The Merriam-Webster definition of 'terse' is 'using few words: devoid of superfluity.' It is not a synonym for noisy. 'my @list' is terser than 'List<T> list,' but both are wordier than better-liked-than-Perl languages like Python, Ruby, and Javascript, which is where Perl's mindshare went (I've been taking that last part as a given). I'm not claiming Perl isn't terse, I'm just saying that it was nonsensical to say that 'PERL's usage of sigils [...] makes code compact and terse.' Compared to C#, sure, but Perl was never competing with C#, and most of the mindshare it used to have didn't go to C#, so it's not really relevant. If the extra terseness (not noisiness) afforded by using sigils was a major reason for Perl's unpopularity, then Python, Ruby, and Javascript's popularity is very strange.
print while (<>);
for line in fileinput.input():
print(line)
Sigils being ugly and Perl being too terse might both be problems it has, but they're different issues.