About that, I loved that perl could be learned in layers. You learned the basics while using the language, and could discover one layer after another and Perl, mostly, kept you going and behaved as you expected. (By contrast, as I see it, to C++).

Except that no: Many people were not even paying attention to that. And the perl sigil system - which was taught pretty much from the start - was still one of the top objections! It wasn't gatekeeping. It was people refusing to learn the tools they were meant to use.