I think your point is valid and I don't dispute it, but if I had a nickel for every time I said "just do it all in perl" and regretted it, I'd be... well, perhaps not a rich man, but I'd have lunch covered for a few weeks.
Perl has the advantage of only having one implementation, unlike sed and grep (e.g. BSD or GNU) and /bin/sh (can be one of many POSIX shells), so upgrading this pipeline to 100% perl is safer in some respects. The example in the article is light on details so it's hard to comment very deeply.
I have heard snarky Perl putdowns ad nauseam at work and on HN and may have regretted using it a handful of times but I can say worse or similar for other popular tools, languages...
I have heard snarky Perl putdowns ad nauseam at work and on HN and may have regretted using it a handful of times but I can say worse or similar for other popular tools, languages...