Some people (me included) LOVED the whitespace-as-a-feature. I had swam through too many scripts where everything (regardless of nesting level) was all on the first character of a line or otherwise spaced randomly where my first step was to properly indent just to understand what it was doing. A language that enforced that was a Godsend.
Nowadays in languages like C/C++/Go/etc we typically enforce the use of an autoformatter to convert source code to a canonical style. It's also great for removing all discussion of such formatting from code reviews.
I loved Perl. I _loved_ it. It was so much fun. It felt like vim in how you could guess weird corners of the language.
But every reason that made it fun is also an actual reason why it's a nightmare unless you are very strict in how its used. Strict on things like whitespace.
A bizarre opinion to be sure. Python is vastly more readable then Perl and is far easier to write as well, hence so many educators in schools reaching for it.
I can understand a love of Perl by folks who love a good puzzle, or who are interested in "code golf" (trying to get something done in the fewest number of characters).
But those are not great traits for a general-purpose programming language. I agree with the other response: "Python just forces you to write code that's better for the team."
Given the choice between Perl and Python, I think it's clear why the latter won out.