Yes, he does talk about it, but I can't say I found it terribly convincing. Particularly given that he characterized "people who don't use (or don't want to use) Perl any more" as the only ones who care about stability or backwards compatibility, and presumed that anyone doing current development wants whiz-bang new features to be added and on by default ASAP, even if it means they have to go back and fix their older code to account for it.

Can't speak for anyone else, but I currently work with Perl code both as a developer and a sysadmin, I have no intention of reducing or stopping my usage of Perl, and yet I prefer to build on a solid foundation rather than shifting sands.