I think the old comment by Larry Wall about “manipulexity” vs “whipuptitude” still holds true. Perl occupies a powerful ecological niche in the space of programming languages. The space has become more crowded over the years, but it's still hard to beat Perl if you're experienced with it. CPAN is a big part of this.
perl developer community found this probably isn't good ideas, so they decided to keep this version number for some important updates. maybe after the experiment end of "class feature" in newest version.
As to the future... Perl 7 is coming (:
https://www.perl.com/article/announcing-perl-7/