I'd take this a step further and say that the design flaws that motivated Perl6 were what really killed Perl. Perl6 just accelerated the timeline.

I do imagine a saner migration could've been done - for example, declaring that regexes must not start with a non-escaped space and division must be surrounded by space, to fix one of the parsing problems - with the usual `use` incremental migration.

Agree 100%. We were told to wait for any improvements or new features we wanted and just to wait for Perl 6, which never came

Yep. Perl 6 was a wall that Perl 5 would never move beyond. It’s still Perl 5 25 years later.

Python 3 couldn't even kill Python 2!

> Python 3 almost killed Python.

People were being crybabies; the critics were extremely vocal and few. Python 3 improved the language in every way and the tooling to upgrade remains unmatched.