Perl doesn't need an ecosystem any more than the Almquist shell does. It's just a nice tool that's omnipresent on UNIX systems. It's definitely going to be useful for shell scripters for a very long time.
list of perl modules in cpan sorted by last update time
Re:What Happened to Perl 7?
by forgotmypw17 on Thursday May 26, 2022 @12:03PM
(#31520012)
My 5 years and counting project diagrees with you.
It's even worse for anything that interacts with libraries or APIs -- those change over time, and often nobody does the work to repair compatibility.
So I think at this point it's fair to say it's dead. Even if the core language is technically functional, the ecosystem is rotting.