There are a considerable number of Perl jobs out there - just not many "greenfield" perl jobs.

Most of them are maintaining existing codebases (not a fun job), and some are "help port this legacy codebase to not perl".

I'd not discount Perl. Its incredibly fast to develop services in, stable as fuck, runs anywhere, performant (relatively), flexible, and if you were a startup looking to get a product out the door, just offer decent TC to a couple of old hands you can ship something viable fast.