The concept of giving functions names spelled out with letters that form words that describe their meaning was invented a long time before Perl figured out that doing that was better than overloading a limited set of ASCII punctuation with random abstract unrelated concepts.

You are going to end up perpetually unhappy if you always assume that people designed things the way they did just because of stupidity / incompetence. Perhaps instead you should take a while to think about the reasons why they might have chosen their design. Even if you can't immediately think of a good reason, doesn't mean there wasn't one.

For this particular case, I'm not sure what drove the selection, but I would guess (since the decision would have been made many decades ago!) it was probably based around perl trying to operate similarly to other command line tools of that era, like awk, sed, (or even ed?), so that people could switch to perl and have a familiar environment? But I don't know, nor have I researched it. In any case, perhaps give the designers the benefit of the doubt before assuming their incompetence?

Yes, that is how Perl evolved. It's called "whipupitude" in The Land of Perl. Larry's initial goal was to create a better sed/awk for Unix.

...and how many of them were designed to be sprinkled liberally in the command line?

Python has a REPL but you couldn’t dump a Python one liner in your Bash pipeline.

Maybe a LISP might qualify but then you’re back to a language family that is unreadable to many and unknown to most (and I say this as someone who loves LISP)

When talking about the original design of Perl you can’t put it in the same category as Python, Pascal and the C-family of languages. Perl was born from an entirely different problem to solve and that’s why some of it’s historic features seem so alien to people outside of the Perl community.