At the time it filled a hole in technology: it was better than bash scripts. It’s also an ancestor programming language, influencing dozens of other technologies, even if only to avoid the missteps.

All that stuff we see as wrong today was new and shiny earlier, with great promise. Perl had to exist to inspire future programmers to never do that again. And quite a few things that were nice was made from it

It really was not that bad as a language, though. If you like lots of two character global variables with the first character always being a punctuation mark