I am not a keyboard warrior who got caught up in the nonsense, but I think some people were simply annoyed at adding syntactic sugar for very marginal benefit. “There should be one way to do things” mantra.
I have a long list of grievances with Python, but the walrus situation would never crack my top ten. Put effort into removing cruft from the standard library, make typing better, have the PSF take a stance on packaging. Anything else feels a better use of time.
Whatever, it won. I will never use it, but when I see it will have to scratch my head and lookup the syntax rules.
It was against many people's aesthetic sense. Including mine. But in theory it can be ignored completely, and in practice it is barely ever used (and indeed nobody forces you to add more uses).
Maybe. He was on the BLACKER VPN project for high-assurance, secure VPN. It had strong requirements for configuration management. Larry Wall was a smart, but lazy, programmer that tired of tedious administration. So, he wrote Perl to automate that.
Maybe he did some kind of deep, programming design. It just sounded in that account more like he threw together whatever solved his problem with some nice ideas baked in. Again, that's if it was true that he invented it to automate tedium during BLACKER VPN.
For public examples of A1, look up SCOMP, GEMSOS, and VAX Security Kernel (VMM). Those papers describe the assurance activities required for A1 certification. At the time, due to bootstrapping requirement, tools like Configuration Management didn't have to be A1. People used all kinds of stuff, like Wall building Perl.
At least we don't have to use it.