One can write good Perl, and I've written some. It has saved me and others quite a lot of time on assorted projects.
These days I tend to use Python where once I'd have used Perl. This is mostly because I find that the young are far more likely to know Python than to know Perl. I will be retiring one of these days, after all.
I'm not anywhere retiring yet, but when Python came around the corner, I thought, well it's as well-suited as Perl for larger things (i.e. not one-liners for text processing - those are a reason for keeping Perl around) but with a cleaner structure.
And that was at a time where you still (occasionally) had to write your own string replacement function that a weirdo company-specific BASIC dialect didn't have.
There's never been a language that I thought of as "Python, but with a cleaner structure", even though Go may be something like "Java 1.2 but with a cleaner structure and a fast toolchain"
I don't think it's necessarily generational. Perl and Python differ in a key regard: Perl went all in on TIMTOWTDI, whereas Python went in the complete opposite direction: enforced whitespace, minimal syntax, strong use of conventions and idioms. (When was the last time you heard somebody inquiring about the Perl-ic way to write something?) As a result, a lot of Perl code is an unreadable mess, and many Python programs are intelligible even to non-programmers. It's hard to overstate what a win this is for Python.
I would add that Perl is still the best for one liners since you don't need to "import" key packages to do basic work e.g. you can regexes in a Perl one liner with no imports.
One can write bad Perl, and I've written a lot.
One can write good Perl, and I've written some. It has saved me and others quite a lot of time on assorted projects.
These days I tend to use Python where once I'd have used Perl. This is mostly because I find that the young are far more likely to know Python than to know Perl. I will be retiring one of these days, after all.