I love my perl5 VM and therefore am not the expert on this.
I've contributed to Parrot and I've contributed to Perl 5. I hope this doesn't sound like an appeal to authority, but after my experiences, I believe that Perl 5 cannot evolve much further unless its internals undergo a similar rethinking.
Parrot has been nailed to the perch since Dan Sugalski left.
Dan designed a pretty good virtual machine to run Perl 5. Compare the timeline of Rakudo's genesis and his departure.
rakudo-ng smells to me like the rakudo guys are preparing to be cross-VM.
I love my perl5 VM and therefore am not the expert on this. But I respect the other language in the perl family (Camelia spec, Rakudo implementation) and think your headline is overblown.