To this day, I have never seen anything that can even remotely approach the ability of Perl to prototype something out of thin air. Usually there is a gap between script-like tools (like sh, sed, awk, grep, jq, curl, etc) with which you can quickly put together stuff and a "real" language which usually needs scaffolding and preparation. Perl can do both, you can write excellent one-liners and you can also write complex software with libraries and frameworks and dependencies and tests.
These guys might have a hard time fitting a recruiter's definition for a "rock star" but they're the best set of colleagues I've had in a very long time, and that's after working at multiple flashy tech companies.
Long live Perl. We can only hope to get another generation of programmers as committed and useful as the people who still write Perl every day.