"Modern Perls are supposedly faster" I thought, until I checked and apparently they used a very recent Perl.
So now my denial is along the lines of "Well they're asking Perl to do things it doesn't need to, like implementing merge sort and binary trees, and, and!, TIMTOWTDI! They're probably choosing a slow way to do things too!"
The other denial idea was: "Interpreted languages offer rapid prototyping and easier debugging, which saves energy during the development process, and that isn't being taken into account here."
...but then I see the ridiculously low scores for JavaScript. I wonder if Perl (or other interpreted languages) had received the amount of scrutiny and attention that JS has had in order that browsers remain relatively fast, whether it would be any faster now.