Perl is, in intent, a cleaned up and
summarized version of that wonderful semi-natural language known as
"Unix". -- Larry Wall
Face it, already: Unix got a lot of things right.
Perl is built for manipulating not just text, but also files,
directories, processes, sockets, ....
Either you learn how Unix does it (in which case your knowledge is
immediately useful beyond Perl) or you learn some artificial object
hierarchy (Perl has those too :-).
Decomposition of problems is what the tools mindset and pipelines
are all about. It's also the basis of software design.