Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your programming language here is only mostly dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.

:P FWIW, I've done a couple of greenfield projects professionally in Perl in the last 10 years and many personal projects. I'm paid at the top range of the market for senior devs. I just looked up the highest salary ranges by language and Perl wasn't even included in their top 10. Then I read the article to see the numbers and I make above every range listed. There was a Perl medical startup that was eating the lunch of a lot of gigantic companies in this time period too because the old companies are deeply vested in generally terrible and aged WIN-oriented tech and platforms in an industry that is being shaken pretty hard on multiple fronts.

Plenty of nice languages today. Perl is still one of them whether or not tech managers have been led to believe otherwise. Adopting Perl as your main language is a fairly savvy move too because as I alluded there is a lot of Perl out there and not a lot of expert Perl devs. In the given supply and demand, it's a sellers' market. Caveat being, the jobs aren't everywhere so one might need to be willing to move for a Perl job.