Today many are shunned because they use "ancient" Perls, anything less than 5.30 is "EOL".

I think you're missing two things here.

First, Perl has yearly releases because that's how the core team believes it can best continue to deliver value to Perl users for free. That's a balance of new features, bug fixes, optimizations, and security improvements. You're probably not paying for that. I'm probably not paying for that. No one in my company is writing a check to the Perl core team once a year to get this, so we don't have a lot of say in how the members of the core team spend their time.

Second, regardless of the success with which the core team has made it possible to run code written for 5.8 on 5.32, there are things you're not getting in 5.8 that you might really need from 5.32. Some of these are security improvements. Some are performance improvements. Some are subtle when you don't know you need them (Unicode improvements), but some are essential when you realize you do (Unicode improvements). Some are really difficult to overcome, such as building an older release on a newer platform.

No one should shun you for running an older version, but you're taking a lot of risk on yourself that running a newer release would otherwise let you avoid. If that's the right thing for your organization, that's one thing—but making that choice without acknowledging that you're on your own and you shouldn't expect core team support or free community support is another.

Does that help?