I was a Perl programmer from the early 1990s until into the 2000s and I mostly agree with you. It was a variety of factors.

The point where I disagree is I think Perl 6/Raku played a significant role in Perl's decline. It really gave me the perception that they were rudderless and that Perl probably had no future.

Other than that, I absolutely loved Perl. I love the language. It's super expressive. I never took a liking to CPAN. And I wonder if it could make a comeback given better dependency management.

I think Perl with tooling similar to uv would cause me to switch back today.