The one unequivocal conclusion is that anyone saying that Perl is "not in demand" is clearly as wrong as it is possible to be.

Being "dead" is somewhat more arbitrary and I'm not sure how you could come up with a solid quantitative measure. However, metacpan maintains a list of recent module releases which shows double-digit numbers every day. That isn't what I would expect to see with a "dead" language.

That only leaves "disliked", which is probably the most subjective and arbitrary of all. Quantifying that would be a fool's errand. The only way to really tell if you dislike a language is to try it. That's how I know I dislike Java. And PHP.