While doing that, i came across several destructive reviews of the Perl programming language itself. It's been described as a "Filthy language" "Dangerous for beginners" and basically, the downfall of many a programmer.

Look, If the solution to a problem requires application of a specific paradigm of thought. No attempt to replace the tool facilitating that, can truly do away with that paradigm

Now look at Perl, what exactly makes Perl, Perl?

If your problem domain requires any of the paradigm perl offers as a solution, trying to replace Perl with any other language produces a situation while you essentially write Perl in that language. I've seen tons of Python code out there, but none with the regex density Perl code is written, or with enough file interaction, or use functional programming paradigms, or with the same flexibility, elegant solutions in the same LOC's, or offering equally quick development time ... The list can go on..

There are sizable number of developers out there, who will never programmatically open a file to do anything, or they may probably write a regex in many years. Because their only way of interacting with data is the html form -> data access point -> database data flow. What you see here is really very minimal manipulation of data, for nearly all the times just using a very minimal combination of standard operators that come with the language does the job. They may never face a situation to search a text in list of other texts, or a need to really simplify massive verbose walls of code to simple elegant and succinct paradigms. There are also chances that, what most web developers need is snippets of well tested code available all over the internet(Surprisingly bulk of the web programming these days is just knowing how to quickly copy/paste and from where).

So it all comes down to, what the person is really to solve here. Having seen Java developers often spend days to write what really is a equivalent of a combination of a shell commands. I can tell you, Perl is exceptionally good at doing things, what other languages don't even have an idea of.