Maybe not a lot of project work, but there's Perl in odd places

Of course. I don't use Perl on the $applications (or should I say @applications) I'm working on; they're in C#, C++, Java. But I still use perl a lot, for crafting my own tools and one-off data munging jobs, etc. My point is, if "Google considers Perl a useful skill", it's not (I guess) because they have Perl projects they need programmers for. But ICBW, IOA. ;-)

they may also be using Perl for portable scripts

I am very skeptical.