>> I suspect that person worked at Amazon. They at one point had gigantic amounts of Perl before they started slowly replacing it with Java.

The Amazon retail website (amazon.com and related versions for various countries) used the Perl Mason templating system (https://masonbook.houseabsolute.com/) to allow various teams to build web site components in a performant and secure way.

It worked quite well since it ran quickly and isolated components so that only one small change could be made without breaking other components.