Yeah, Perl 6 was certainly A Thing. I am not sure practicing Perl programmers cared much about it. I went to the talks and thought "neat" but it didn't really seem like "welp, this is taking forever, I'm switching to Python." Maybe if everyone working on Perl 6 decided to work on data science tooling instead, Perl would have "beaten" Python in that area and things would be different, but the world doesn't really work that way, so I don't think Perl 6 really mattered in terms of Perl fading away. A lot of people learned a lot of things about language design, and that will no doubt benefit the entire field for many years to come. (Look at "Go 2" versus "Perl 6", for example.)

On some level, everything is like that. Perl was a better awk/grep and was successful in replacing those tools. Then one day, someone decided to use it for CGI, and it got a huge popularity boost. But the people that decided to use it for CGI could have easily used something else, and it would have probably worked fine and Perl never would have been popular. It was just random chance that they picked Perl and made it popular. I feel like everything works that way. Javascript is popular for web UIs because someone decided to add it to a popular web browser. There is always some intrinsic randomness that plays a part in gaining mindshare. A bad tool with a good mindshare can do well, and a great tool with no boost can languish in obscurity. Perl benefited a lot from luck, but rolling the dice doesn't last forever.