And I think there is a place for perl, just like there is a place for bash one-liners.
The authors example is personal software. The things we write to scratch our own little itches, that do not need to be shared or developed together with other people.
My pet peeve is that macos is really unfriendly to people solving their own problems.
It is really hard to script anything.
I know that there are shell scripts. I know that there is applescript and automator.
In my experience, if you want to do some script-level task to make your life easier - the effort required is high and the chances of success are uncertain.
Is this by design? Do they want you to buy your tools and scripts instead of easily creating them yourself?
If you have the perseverance to automate things, you have to dig deep into the apple-invented compiled languages objective-c or swift.
Now with ai, I suspect people will be able to leapfrog over the no-scripting canyon and do the things they want.