I wouldn't call it reviled. Perl makes for a poor general purpose programming language, it always did. You can write an HTTP server in Perl but you probably shouldn't. It's very good for what it was always intended for, those situations where you need to process some data, but like just once not every week for the rest of eternity.

I've never regretted a Perl program that I wrote, used and discarded. And I've never been content with a Perl program I found I was still using a week after I wrote it.