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.)