My understanding is that Larry included goto in Perl because he knew that Perl's success depended on convincing people that what they were already doing with awk and sed could be done by Perl. He therefore wanted to write automatic code translators s2p and a2p from those languages to Perl.

Since sed scripts use goto extensively, he either needed to automatically translate sed scripts to goto-less versions, or else he needed to add goto to Perl. It was easier to add goto to Perl, so he did.

This is one of the two necessary uses of goto that I have seen in Perl.