Perhaps it's just your company that's dysfunctional, not all big companies.
And I wouldn't call it dysfunctional to not make it easy for people to be downloading all kinds of software for production systems.
If only we felt the same way about letting people write their own software for production systems...
I find the default install of Perl to have just as many libraries built in as Python does. So even if you can't access CPAN then neither Perl or Python has a library advantage out of the box.
The best part with Perl is the CPAN. If you know what you do, for quite a few areas you are crazily productive. It makes good economic sense.
My point is -- the size of the default install is irrelevant, the win is when you install stuff from CPAN. It is arguably better if the default install is thin, because then people/organizations will have routines to install stuff from CPAN...
(Other good points with Perl is that the language is fun and that the social culture of nerds is wonderful. The main negative ones for Perl are the trolling ("PERL is dead") and the learning curve.)