You're largely preaching to the choir, I don't disagree with anything you said.
As a web application developer who got started professionally in the 1990s, I not only vividly remember Perl being everywhere, I actively wrote a lot of it.
However, in my more recent experience, it is more likely to hear people talk about COBOL, FORTRAN or C++ than it is to discuss Perl. All of those languages predate Perl.
Java also still gets a ton of discussion and it's not shiny and new anymore.
Most of us who spent time writing and maintaining Perl in the 1990s were all too willing to abandon it in favour of other languages with similar features, not because they were shiny and new but because of major pain points with Perl (it earned the meme that it's a write-only language). In my opinion, Perl's greatest contribution and staying power was it's regex engine and syntax which persists.
I don't even like python, for what it's worth, but it's popular for more reasons than it just being "shiny and new" (to the extent that you can even say that about python these days).