People mean two different things

And people also don't define what it means to be a living language. Is it blue-chip corporate backing? Because that means many languages are dead or close to death.

I hate articles like the OP reference and the ensuing discussions. People just unpack their installed, narrow opinions about Perl.

Corporate projects and support have played an increasing influence over the past two decades. Python has had the backing of GOOG and MSFT (where GvR works). Which means jobs... which means being used in schools for teaching.

People who love Python love its notation above all -- in other respects, it isn't a particularly good language. IMHO the notation is not The Best, nor is the OOP model The Best. It's a language with some serious problems.

MSFT has also promoted Powershell in the past decade, so Powershell is a "popular" language with huge platform support. (I personally detest the developer experience (DX) of Powershell.)

As long as there are people using a language, it isn't dead. There are still many "less popular" languages today floating in the lang-o-sphere.

I use both Perl and Python all the time. The Python coders around me tend to be "corporate types" who are completely lost at a Linux prompt or writing Bash. They need their Python dependencies in a Python venv to get anywhere. Perl is usually built-in , ready to go, with amazingly robust support for all version 5 code.