Programs are complex beasts no matter what you use to express them so the simpler do you make one thing, the more complex ends up some other.

I don't buy that. I think that Perl makes a lot of things much simpler than they would be in, let's say, C. Memory management, for example. There isn't a complexity debt to be paid. It's not zero sum.

What I meant by "Perl has too many weird pitfalls for beginners" is not obfuscation but rather things that look good to a beginner but aren't. Examples:

$x = ~ /regex/;
%hash = map { "\L$_", 1 } @array;
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If the poor beginner hasn't learned to Use strict and warnings,

$hash1 = { a => 1 };
$hash1{b} = 2;
# $hash1{a} == 1, right?  No?
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I don't think the degree to which a language can be obfuscated should be a concern for beginners. A beginner reads code only from a text book that doesn't obfuscate or from their own programs which they also haven't obfuscated. The problem with Perl for a beginner is that it's possible to write code that looks as if it should work but doesn't because of some obscure historical reason or very common misunderstanding.

I saw something like this not too long ago:

foreach (@foo_list) {
    my $x = "blah $_ blah";
    my $foo = $_;
    while ( something() ) {
        # more stuff
        foreach (@bar_list) {
            other( $_ );
        }
    }
    more_with( $foo );
}
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I wonder how long the programmer had to debug to figure out that $_ at the end of the loop had changed, and it ought to be saved in $foo. To you and me, "foreach my $foo (@foo_list)" is obvious, but we learned the lessons of $_ a long time ago.

See also perltrap. (We have a whole section of the documentation for "traps for the unwary"!)