Comment by Grinnz

You were reading between the lines, and the initial announcement was writing between them. But like I said, it is not feasible to maintain a LTS Perl 5 next to a fork of the interpreter. The actual proposal was only even to maintain Perl 5 for a few years before sunsetting it. CPAN would not have been compatible with Perl 7, it would require a separate ecosystem of code and installed libraries. The ideas sound nice but I don't think a lot of people would have been happy with how the details would have worked out. Most of the problems you're talking about are more a deficiency of perception and tooling, and these can be addressed without such drastic measures.