CPAN is still where the most interesting work is happening with Perl. Often blog posts like Dave's here will highlight features added to recent perl versions, which from outside the community looks pretty underwhelming. Probably it is, but that isn't as compelling as what you can get from outside the core.
While the core devs of perl concentrate on optimisation of the language and slowly add new features, the strong backwards compatibility approach constrains what can be done with it. The backwards compatibility is so important that development builds of the core will run against the entirety of CPAN's distributions' test suites to see if changes break anything there. This is know as "BBC" - blead breaks CPAN. If a change breaks something on CPAN then it needs to be reevaluated. I don't know if any other languages have an equivalent - running not just the internal test suite but also an enormous external one?
The nature of Perl means external modules can bend the language in some pretty interesting ways and build atop a strong foundation. The new features added to the language are slowly being used by more module authors to create features and libraries that are what you want to focus on.
See https://metacpan.org/pod/Task::Kensho for some of these.
