(Asker has already found a solution as of writing this.)

By the way, is there a safe way to remove all perl and have a complete clean install?

It should be possible to remove everything except the system Perl (do not attempt to remove the system Perl on macOS!). In this case, I don't think doing so would have been a bad idea, actually; many of the approaches here may have been interfering (at a minimum, I know that MacPorts and Homebrew advise against being installed simultaneously, and make no effort to "play nice" around each other), or at least not reducing the amount of confusion.

To clean up all MacPorts Perl(s):

sudo port uninstall --follow-dependents perl5 perl5.26 perl5.28