I agree with "for Unixy folks who know shell, C, awk, sed, Vim, etc. Perl is a natural extension. Then came a generation of programmers brought up on ... I don't know, Visual Basic and Java? and these were more attracted to something like Python.".

I believe this, too.

I do not use Python. I would rather use Perl (!), Tcl, Lua (!), Go (!), C (!), OCaml, Erlang / Elixir, and Factor / Forth, and very rarely Common Lisp (SBCL). I do not like Java / Kotlin and related languages. That said, I started with shell scripts, and then probably a little bit of Perl and Tcl, and very often C because back when I was a kid I was modding ioquake3 forks that are written in C.