While you can FIND Perl jobs, it is effectively dead for most of the hiring market. It will never truly disappear. COBOL is not dead either. Is it really something that we think of when we talk about modern software engineering? Not really.
How much production software is started from scratch every day using the language?
I started my career in Perl and I still have fond memories of working with it up to late 2000's, but by that time the writing was solidly on the wall.
Dead in this context means "niche".
