I've switched most of my projects to golang these days, but even as recently as a couple of years ago I was writing pretty big sites with Perl.

Using https://metacpan.org/pod/CGI::Application to provide the framework, along with similar small frameworks - e.g. a perl version of sinatra.

Golang managed to persuade people to write tests, by making it easy and self-contained. I'd suggest with Test::More that Perl did something similar. Almost all the modules you'd find on CPAN are full of test-cases.

There might well be thinks we can argue about with Perl, but it is definitely true that it has/had one of the biggest and most consistent set of extensions out there. CPAN has held up pretty well, compared to some of the later alternatives (such as node modules, ruby gems, etc). One reason that I was able to work with Perl so easily was because I could find Stripe integrations, and similar with ease.

I mean, I worked in the .com era with perl coders who made some pretty compelling products out of Perl, for the time, with some discipline, and TBH... it wasn't terrible, and when they "Did the right thing" and rewrote the whole thing in the new hotness (J2EE) it _was_ terrible.

Perl will let you hang yourself, and I hated it at the time, but it also got the job done.