I don't think it worked as well in the good old days as you think.

A lot of Perl's problems can be attributed to one of those old men, Tom Christensen. He combined technical brilliance with a flair for flaming, and was at the center of why p5p (perl 5 porters) became a hostile flame-fest. With the result that the 5.6.x series was a complete disaster. And the problems were so bad that as http://strangelyconsistent.org/blog/happy-10th-anniversary-p... describes, in 2000 Jon Orwant (editor of The Perl Journal) brought attention to it by smashing mugs against a wall.

The current spat is much less dramatic than that one was. You just know about it because it is current.

People claim that Perl's problems began with Perl 6. But in fact Perl 6 was one piece of Larry Wall's solution to a rather urgent problem. And that problem was how to separate people who wanted to create new features from people who wanted absolute backwards compatibility. Like Tom Christensen. (Who Larry Wall also told to calm down.) And ideas from Perl 6 also made their way back to Perl 5 in various ways. Yes, it became a branding problem. But if it didn't happen, Perl was set to implode on itself much more dramatically, much more quickly.