Unfortunately, yes, people are still building new systems in Perl. In my experience, it's been because existing infrastructure that new systems need is already written in Perl.
I'll note that if you use a strict subset of Perl, and write it well, with lots of unit tests, it's bearable to use. But it falls massively short when it comes to anything concurrent or async. And if you stray into the "clever" subset of Perl, frankly it becomes hell. The ecosystem is also pretty much dead, it's not unusual to find bugs in packages where the issue tracker hasn't been responded to in 10 years, and the issue for the bug you're interested in has been languishing for literally years.
I'll note that if you use a strict subset of Perl, and write it well, with lots of unit tests, it's bearable to use. But it falls massively short when it comes to anything concurrent or async. And if you stray into the "clever" subset of Perl, frankly it becomes hell. The ecosystem is also pretty much dead, it's not unusual to find bugs in packages where the issue tracker hasn't been responded to in 10 years, and the issue for the bug you're interested in has been languishing for literally years.