Agreed, Perl scripts were often write-only, especially when people get cute with the shorthands.
At the same time, it is rare for me to see a Bourne/Bash script without obvious serious defects in it.
(Many people don't understand the shell script textual substitution evaluation model at all. And even those people who do, the model gets very hard to reason about as soon as you try to do some data value handling that's absolutely trivial in most high-level languages.)
Not ad-hominem but where were you 95-2006 because Gawk, Sed and Burne shell were the answer to read only perl scripts. That is one of the reasons Perl is basically no longer used: it was used without discipline.
There was actually a progressive mode amongst those systems programmers I knew who knew what they were doing at the time.
* bash + sed for the easy stuff * bash + gawk or just gawk for the ETL stuff * TCL for systems glue + swig * C when you are bespoke or need performance
Perl was great in theory but I cringed every time I saw a script.