For me, the strength of Perl 5 in 2018 is that the code I am writing today looks quite different from the Perl 5 code I've written a decade ago, but the code I've written back then still works.

This might never have occurred to me but it is the truth and a nice way to think about it. I wrote my first production script after 2 weeks of dabbling with Perl almost 20 years ago. It was strict-free 100% code smell but it worked exactly as it was supposed to—through brute force meets trial and error—and was something a (mostly) beginner could do.