The way I look at it:

- Perl is still maintained
- CPAN still grows
- sites like this still exist
- books about Perl are still written
- conferences are regularly held

For my rather modest requirements that is "vibrant" - and I expect that to continue for some time...

And there is still Perl-code around that I expect will still last for a long time, simply because rewriting that would mean reverse-engineering a lot of very old and poorly documented code which nobody wants to do. But true - those are only some niches.

So yes - depressingly the "future" seems to be rather bleak...