And yet in 2018, I never think about Perl anymore, but use sed, awk, and grep daily.
Eventually the cycle will repeat again. The moment you will have non trivial text work to do, awk will have to give way to Perl.
The rise of Python was really use case for dealing with standard interfaces like DBs/XMLs/JSONs becoming common. Python hasn't actually replaced Perl in any meaningful way.
In the web space, Python is not huge, but it definitely supplanted the niche Perl used to have. No one I know writes web stuff in Perl anymore.
I entered the field at the tail end of the Perl era, so I've only toyed with it a long time ago.
Meanwhile, if you randomly mashed on your keyboard, it would output a perl script.
I jumped to Python as soon as I found out about it in the late 90's, because it was exactly what I was looking for in self-documenting structuring. It was great for creating parsers with state-machines. I was also the user of my scripts, and I didn't want to have to relearn what I coded a year or so earlier. Python let me pick that up, and to a lesser extent, awk. State machine programming was really self-documenting in Python.
But now we live in a world where no one knows perl, and languages like python and javascript are clumsy and weird in this space. And that makes awk look clever and elegant.
All I'm saying is that in perl-world (which was a real place!), awk wasn't clever and elegant, it was stale and primitive. And that to me is more surprising than awk's cleverness.