My me-too post.
I was a web developer working nearly exclusively in Perl during the time period the author describes. I understand the author's lack of a handle on the period as he was, as he describes, in middle school at the time. Me, I had a job and a family and I was an actual Perl programmer. Come at me bro.
That aside, the description of a transition of developers from Perl to Python just didn't happen the way it is described in the article. Or, to be fair, it didn't happen that way for me.
I worked on a team extracting data from a number of disparate data sources and presenting reports on the web - basically the idiomatic Perl task. We tried to bring in PHP for a bit but found it wanting. As our jobs evolved out from under us, each of us moved on from Perl. Reporting jobs were becoming largely obsolete and there was market demand for working in other languages elsewhere. Being the early oughts, most of the engineers I knew had at least a few languages in their repertoire.
Of the developers I worked with, I was the only one to pick up Python. I remember feeling like I wanted to work with a dynamic language where OO was more core to the language feature set. Ruby and Python were both viable, though less known, options. I don't remember why I chose Python over Ruby, but I did.
My colleagues went on to work in Java or C#. Over time, I did a bit of both as well, especially C#. One buddy of mine still does his personal and peripheral scripting in Perl. I've largely forgotten the language.
Back on topic, I simply did not see an exodus of developers from Perl to Python. It just didn't happen that way within my community. Jobs got phased out, new ones began, often with new tools.
Off topic, what I did see at the time was a large movement of COBOL developers to JAVA. I saw that as a genuine migration, in earnest, of developers who were facing obsolescence.