If you're doing a really grungy, grotty text mangling task in a UNIX pipeline, suddenly all those crazy Perl features start making sense. The reason why Perl is arguably not the best choice for other tasks, such as creating large systems, is precisely that it's actually got many distinct advantages over Python for that sort of task. It's also really good for "I have a UNIX pipeline but this one chunk of it needs a database and this other chunk needs a JSON file and a few other things that shell just can't do".

For instance, for the first time in 15+ years, I recently had a reason to use Perl's half-deprecated, off-handedly-included form printing support, and, you know what? It's really nice if that's what you want. Many dozens of lines of code replaced by what is basically a picture of what I want.

Python is a great language, but every once in a while "explicit is better than implicit", which is generally a philosophy I agree with wholeheartedly, results in a lot more "explicit", in the form of "code I had to write", than you might be looking for. (Or, alternatively, you start writing Python that is a lot more implicit, which isn't exactly a huge victory for Python here.)

Nowadays I'd also suggest that if you find yourself having a lot of those tasks, you need to ask some questions about how you're storing your data. But pretty much everybody ends up with some of these somewhere; it's hard to eliminate them, and not really worth it (due to diminishing returns).