> And on top of that, the sigils, refs, and `wantarray` systems means that figuring out what syntax you need to invoke something correctly is confusing mental overhead that you have to keep in mind for every function call
That's just badly written libraries that exist in pretty much every ecosystem. By now it seems we have settled that after a couple of args the way to pass multiple arguments is via a hash.
I speak as someone who has programmed in Perl for over 20 years and at one point was the top poster on Perlmonks.
The wantarray feature is a problem with Perl, and not libraries. It has nothing to do with how you pass your arguments, but rather how the data comes back. Every single function has to deal with the potential of context. Every choice you make has downsides. The choices made around wantarray tend to age poorly. And many Perl programmers are deeply confused about the difference between these lines:
my $bar = foo();
my ($baz) = foo();
I firmly believe that context is one of the worst ideas in Perl. There is a good reason why it was not borrowed by other languages. It is far better to expand arrays like Ruby does with * instead.
This is why Raku doesn't have contexts in that sense. All a subroutine or method can ever return, is a single object. Such an object can be a List or an Array, but it is still a single value.
Whether context is good or bad, a success or a mistake, there's no denying it is either one of the most or the most important idea in Perl.
That you can not really know how it works and still get by in Perl without problems 95% is a testament to Perl trying to make life easier for the programmer, as well as one of the things that contributes most to people not understanding Perl or viewing it as inconsistent and confusing.
That said, I don't really think you can remove it from Perl without making it a drastically different language. Context pervades almost everything, and is how many idiomatic statements actually function (e.g. assigning a hash to another hash is really just list context read from a hash and list context write to a hash).
Perlmonks, in my view, is one of the main reasons Perl community went nowhere. The answer to a question should not be, excuse my french, an exercise in who can swing their dick in the most intricate and convoluted way while accidentally answering the question in the most obfuscated way possible.
That's just badly written libraries that exist in pretty much every ecosystem. By now it seems we have settled that after a couple of args the way to pass multiple arguments is via a hash.