Exactly my point. You had proportionally as many perl jobs in the late 90s as you have Ruby jobs today. It even had early mover advantage in the scripting space and insanely good ecosystem of libraries.

I almost took one a little more than a year ago, and I wasn't even looking for one...

There are a considerable number of Perl jobs out there - just not many "greenfield" perl jobs.

Most of them are maintaining existing codebases (not a fun job), and some are "help port this legacy codebase to not perl".

I'd not discount Perl. Its incredibly fast to develop services in, stable as fuck, runs anywhere, performant (relatively), flexible, and if you were a startup looking to get a product out the door, just offer decent TC to a couple of old hands you can ship something viable fast.

Perl is a great tool for when you want to scale that text mangling file wrangling bash script to do more stuff, and pretty much in no other case.

A horrifying amount of applications out there that I've seen are basically just that - wrassling some text around, but with a billion layers of unnecessary abstraction.

I get to see a lot of peoples code in my job. Most of it is ridiculous levels of over engineering

Dice lists 10 times more Perl jobs than Rust jobs and almost 3 times more than Kotlin.