I'm not sure a real newbie needs a persistence layer at all. They should probably use DBI directly. But regardless, I still don't think that too much choice has been shown to be a significant problem for language acceptance, as evidenced by Java. The language with the fewest choices is probably Ruby, and it is currently way below all of its competitors in terms of jobs and popularity (though not in buzz).

I think too much choice is more annoying for people like us, who already know that we want a good perl persistence layer and don't want to wade through CPAN looking for it. The solution for that is a combination of community (CPAN ratings, mailing lists, PerlMonks) and building expertise at identifying good modules. There's no simple answer for it because the question "What do you want from a persistence layer?" is pretty complex.