That you can not really know how it works and still get by in Perl without problems 95% is a testament to Perl trying to make life easier for the programmer, as well as one of the things that contributes most to people not understanding Perl or viewing it as inconsistent and confusing.

That said, I don't really think you can remove it from Perl without making it a drastically different language. Context pervades almost everything, and is how many idiomatic statements actually function (e.g. assigning a hash to another hash is really just list context read from a hash and list context write to a hash).

Perlmonks, in my view, is one of the main reasons Perl community went nowhere. The answer to a question should not be, excuse my french, an exercise in who can swing their dick in the most intricate and convoluted way while accidentally answering the question in the most obfuscated way possible.