Not luck of the draw, it was because of the OOP craze in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In undergraduate school I took some introductory programming classes for an easy A, as I was already working as a web developer (like many in my generational cohort) for living expenses. (My degree program was entirely unrelated.) In one of those classes I just ended up as something of a [very poor] TA for the professor. At some point he told me that his department was looking to reorganize their curriculum to emphasize OOP and asked what I thought about Java and Python. I had never programmed in either, mostly working with Perl, JavaScript, PHP and ColdFusion. But I told him that Python was becoming popular in the open source space, and the simplicity of the language, including dynamic typing, and freely available tooling would likely make it more accessible.
I don't know if he took my advice, but in any event as I remember things Python eventually overtook Perl partly, if not largely, by riding the OOP wave. People like to say that it was because Python was simpler and more consistent (TOOWTDI instead of TMTOWTDI), but it was really only simpler and more consistent in the context of OOP programming. For quick, top-to-bottom procedural programming tasks Perl has always been simpler, IMO.