For all his agreeableness, maybe Larry Wall left behind a chaos of unsolved semantics. Perhaps discussions they never really recovered from. I do not know the story, and this is speculative only.
From what I've gathered, Larry was simply focused on Perl 6 (which became "Raku" in Oct of 2019). It seems to me that he just wanted to let others handle the new development in Perl 5 rather than being directly involved all of the time. I don't think he has done much at all with Perl 5 for quite a long time.