I remember seeing some polite discussion on the subject of removing perl dependencies from Debian, where the conclusion was essentially "fergetabodit".

I think that sort of thing is sadly to be expected. There's a substantial subculture of people who have as their primary distinguishing feature in common an unreasonable hatred of Perl. They're probably strongest in the Python and Java communities, but I'm just kinda guessing on that based on my own (anecdotal) experience. I've seen them piping up in various places advocating for rewriting everything previously done in Perl with a "real" language (most often meaning Python, occasionally actually meaning Java or even PHP). In general, people tend to dismiss such counter-advocacy as impractical, but I have seen people on occasion seriously consider replacing a bunch of system scripts in Perl with equivalents in Python.

Anyway, for the most part, I believe it's just a noisy minority that does that sort of thing, and I suspect that was the case for Debian as well (polite, as you say, but still noisy).