I've not used Perl as my primary language in over a decade, but it remains my favorite.

I never used CGI.pm for generating HTML...the idea of using functions for tags seemed unneccusarily dense when HTML is a string and Perl is well suited to handling strings. Later I shifted to templating modules like HTML::Template and Template::Toolkit. I assume those are long defunct, but vfb the point is that they offered better functionality than CGI.pm

For parsing params, yes, I used CGI.pm.