ok sure, but unix is still here and perl died

there's a subtle thing about perl that's not mentioned often, which is how it borrowed ideas from many other tools and that made perl "intuitive" to learn for people who knew the other tools. But once you're embedded in just perl for awhile, you forget the other tools and then perl's grab-bag of borrowed ideas becomes sort of burdensome, it loses "intuitiveness".

Perl itself died. But Perl's philosophy of batteries included and do almost everything in a single language won.

If anything, Perl killed classic Unix and much of the Unix philosophy.

Every major modern design looks more like Perl than like Unix: Python, Ruby, PHP, JavaScript, Java, C#, Swift, Go, Rust, etc.

They're all "batteries included".

Only after I had to do some non-trival Bash scripting did I stop hating Perl's syntax. For one thing, at least Perl wasn't as bad as Bash. For another, I now understood where Perl came from!

Perl's syntax is a relic of its time, and it blazed a trail for what to do (and what to avoid!) in later scripting languages.

Perl didn't die. Perl superseded awk.