Nah, plenty of people still care about it (I should know, I'm one of them!). And with regular expressions front-and-center in perl, I still find it wonderful for text munging.

Maybe I'm just bitter because of Parrot. I so wanted to use it for my language.

Then you should maybe have a look at MoarVM (https://moarvm.org). It is now the main backend for Raku (née Perl 6) and is all that Parrot was intended to be, and then some. If you want to get into it, you might want to have a look at https://github.com/edumentab/rakudo-and-nqp-internals-course (course materials that implemented a Ruby and a PHP on MoarVM).

That looks extremely promising!

Is Parrot dead (Monty Python pun intended)? I've lost track of the different Perl 6 implementations and their subparts.

Yes, the Parrot project is in deep, very deep hibernation.