The cool thing is that Perl is compatible, and maintaining compatibility is the top priority for Perl developers. so, many distros keep updating it because it's very safe to do so. When many projects switched from GPL2 to GPL3 macOS famously decided to either freeze some bundled tools, switch to alternatives or removed them entirely. It took them years and years, but all this time Perl has been a notable exception.

As a result nowadays you can be very certain that every machine you run your code on has a very recent Perl installed, so you can use many new stuff, too. It's an old language, but the code you can write can be pretty modern, which is nice.

It's still Perl: lots of symbols, some variables get set up implicitly for you, some keywords look silly to modern eyes (`my` to declare a variable, `sub` declares a function). Some newish stuff is handy. Like, these days you can specify types of parameters in function signatures, and it does a rudimentary type-checking for you. And Perl regexes are still better than in ANY language out there, for 35 years and counting!