IMHO Perl's reputation for noisy code is mostly the result of code golf examples online and denoting variables with an explicit type character.
A sanely written Perl program is nowhere near line noise. Compare to supposedly beautiful languages like Rust and the ratio of punctuation characters to alphanumeric is pretty much on par.
You're right. I find Rust code much harder to comprehend. But the sigils and the arrow operator are kind of annoying. I think Ruby fixed most of Perl's annoyances and created new ones.
A sanely written Perl program is nowhere near line noise. Compare to supposedly beautiful languages like Rust and the ratio of punctuation characters to alphanumeric is pretty much on par.