Perl was my first love as a language, and I don't recall any hostility towards Perl users. On the contrary, the environment in the early 2000s was very supportive.

Perl likely declined because Perl6 did a Duke Nukem Forever, and Perl5 was dated and not incredibly well-adapted to OOP. Then Python got taken up for teaching, and it was all over.

(I still love Perl5, still use it in one-liners all the time, and still code up quick CLI tools with it.)

How so? I stopped hanging around in Perl-land around 2001 and it seemed friendly enough way back then. What happened to it?