Sadly not true enough for many languages.
But I think equally true for the languages considered its successors: Ruby and Python.
From what I've seen of at least Python, it can't really touch CPAN (yet?). It is not the same width of neither modules nor infrastructure (CPAN Testers, etc.).
And the lack of code blocks irritates the life out of me. But I get why it is a common education language, like Pascal in its days.
Edit: Mithaldu wrote this up well.
I was responding directly to the "loved" part, but now I realize that was not clear. For the record, I think everything but CPAN applies to Ruby and Python. And your personal irritations are not really relevant to people who use it, just as my personal irritations with Perl are relevant to people who use (and maybe love) it.
Considering the amount of trolling you get when Perl is mentioned on e.g. HN, I'd say that some other language culture's love is boundless -- and a bit less than fully grown up...
Which also applies to that "great community" point. Shudder.
"Perl Programmers love their language." Sadly not true enough for many languages. Does PHP programmers love their language like Perl programmers do for example? Somehow I doubt it.
"True Freedom" Perl is free and open source and most code is too. How does that compare to Java or the microsoft stack?
"Great Community" There are a lot of great communities surrounding most languages to be sure, but it's a stretch to say that any (every) language has it.
"CPAN" How would this apply to any language? There's simply nothing near CPAN anywhere. Ruby has gems and Haskell has hackage, but they aren't comparable to CPAN in size or breadth.
"Awesome Third Party Support" Is a language simply the syntax and the standard library or could the freely available libraries and tools be counted too? In that case Perl stands out as well, there's just so much of it. Can C or Java rival it? Sure, maybe, but most others won't even come close.
"Jobs" I wouldn't say that Perl has the highest job count out there, but compare it to Scala, Haskell, Go, Rust and many other and it's probably easier to get hired.
I like Perl, it's a fun language to use, but I'm not the biggest Perl advocate in the world. But it does do pretty good in the above points and to say it's a checklist that can be applied to any language is just untrue.
If there are good or bad points that's a whole other topic. I think they are pretty good points, and we must remember that this is an explanation of why they personally are using Perl. Find another language which does better on these points if you can, cause I can't think of any.