From my point of view, CGI.pm is not dead and it can still be conveniently installed and used. It's just not part of the Perl core anymore, but I see that as an upside as that means less ad-hoc modifications to the Perl core by OS vendors. It also allows an actually more frequent release schedule to the module because OS vendors now don't need to "update" the Perl package just to update the CGI package, and all users of CGI have the CGI package installed.