Since you mentioned Perl, I wonder if you've tried Mojolicious at all and what you think of it? I've found it pretty nice to work in, and easily scalable to small and large projects.
That said, I don't have is a lot of experience with other frameworks in other languages to compare it to, so I don't exactly know how it compares.
Yes, it's technically a non-zero problem. I get it. Having spent several years in the Java/Spring world, the classic ASP world, and the Perl world... they all have problems, both with the languages and the ecosystems. There will always be people who will throw out Rust or Go or Erlang as 'better' by some metric.
For the types of projects I work on, the modern PHP stacks of the last 5-6 years are all probably the best ROI. Colleagues/friends are running medium-sized SaaS on Rails, and it works, but we compare headaches sometimes, and it's not carefree in the Rails world. There's issues there. Regardless of whether your language is 'clean' or 'discoverable', the rest of the ecosystem can still present problems.