Many years of programming practice and SE theory have taught some of us that discipline is not the main concern of most programmers and the higher a level you require of it, the more you will be disappointed. Which means that you tend to get more maintainable results from languages which either require very little discipline to produce good code or those that strictly enforce discipline (e.g. Go).
Sadly, even the code on CPAN (which was built to withstand some scrutiny apparently, or why else would anyone release it to the public) is often so badly written that I wouldn't want to debug or maintain it.
> And as the author states, you (almost) always have an choice to run other languages, where perl runs. Not really a hostage situation, methinks.
In practice you're more likely to find old, hard to maintain Perl code bases that noone is able or wants to rewrite in another language, if you get hired to program in Perl. If there was a realistic choice to use another language, it was likely made already years ago.