No one who remembers the 90s-00s (and how incredibly helpful Perl was, until those other languages at its lunch) has any "hate", as such for Perl. Even its staunchest critics (best as I recall) still had a strong baseline respect for what it was able to accomplish, and how it moved the craft as a whole forward.

I disagree that it still makes for a good choice, for the simple overriding reason that (whatever one thinks of it) it has objectively become a niche language, and a will continue to remain a slowly fading one at that. In fact it's been solidly on that course for close to 20 years now.

As such it's hard to think of a good argument for bringing it into your toolchain in a big way, absent some very good reason (like some specific tool or subsystem based on it).

That said I don't mind your sticking up for it, and there's no reason you should be downvoted for doing so.