What Perl did that was amazing was bring regular expressions "to the masses", and Perl-compatible regular expressions (pcre) are still the defacto standard that most subsequent libraries have used (more or less).
"The internet" is an abstraction and doesn't hate (or love) anything. That itself is the kind of gross generalization you are criticizing. And one can criticize a language and still have respect for it.
I can count the number of tool-agnostic development teams that I've met on one hand. Many more have claimed they are when they are not.
If you aren't aiming for the top 10% of jobs (vague quality metric that you can interpret as you wish), then you want to have above-average knowledge of _just_ Python, Go, React, Docker and Kubernetes.
The situation only changes when high profile current/ex-Googlers (or similar) start talking about a language/tool a lot. Then the mass hops on board that train too.
And I don't think "high-profile" people talking has much effect. Paul Graham talked up lisp for a while, and I was certainly interested (I like lisps), but... there are still precious few jobs that use Lisp. Most people learn technologies that they either need currently or are in use in jobs they know of and might conceivably get.
Paul Graham, while a thought-leader of sorts, isn't generally thought of as someone working at either the edge of tech or in large-scale systems. That's why nobody wants to chase the tech he's using vs what Google/Facebook/etc are.
It's disgusting how much we all rely on intuition and gut feelings when evaluating large swathes of technology. The internet hates perl so people criticize it without even using it. People will use what everybody else is using without actually trying out the options. There's too much information and so we must go with what others have said, and it all becomes hearsay. Keeping up is more like wizardry than engineering. Go with what the crowd says because I can't possibly install all of those libraries, play with the examples, and give my own evaluation. Hey look a new js framework just came out...