Even after the Perl 5 / Perl 6 / Raku debacle? Many developers left after that (Python pulled off the same trick a decade later.. apparently some language teams have very short memories.)

Some of that code has been running for a long time. A lot of the Perl toolchain still works on 5.8.1 (released Sept 2003).

https://metacpan.org/release/JHI/perl-5.8.1

Test::Simple still targets 5.6.2, which looks to have been released around the same time (November 2003).

https://metacpan.org/release/RGARCIA/perl-5.6.2

I have quite a bit of personal scripting in perl that I wrote in the early 90s, still in use every week. Haven't changed any of the code in decades.