PHP has dried up and blown away, so has Ruby but I think we remember Ruby more fondly because RoR had an impact in web frameworks for other languages.
I’d also say Perl was Unix-centric in its thinking while Python embraced Windows early on. Also back when I was using CPAN I don’t remember anything like virtual environments. There is am immediate squee of freedom when you can just install packages and not think about environments but the day you need too conflicting dependencies it is either “game over” or living with painful consequence every time you make a move. It took Python years to get to the point where it is just “uv and chill”
But Perl held on for a little longer in sysadmin circles, even as PHP started taking over web sites. Perl was THE glue code for us ops folks. There's still quite a bit of perl out there too.
Python took over on the ops side rather than Ruby, but that came later still. It wasn't until config management & early DevOps started becoming main stream that Python was replacing perl at scale.
Java allowed an army to work on the same project and gave managers "the server" that they could control. Java had doctrines and best practices and ant. TMTOWTDI means that the senior engineer can't bully people with best practices.
What Killed Perl?
