Perl's terseness is about ripping meaning away from the code's symbolic representation to save a few characters. That's a related issue to boilerplate, but it's not the same thing at all.

Boilerplate is usually maximized in projects which try to give users a huge amount of flexibility that they don't need or want.

This is partly why minimizing boilerplate is so hard - one thing that continually surprises me is what users want flexibility over and what they don't. I've lost count of the number of times I've given users flexibility to do something they don't give a shit about and not given them the flexibility to do something they really wanted.