Pretty much all of the CPAN stuff I care about - Moose, Catalyst, DBIx::Class etc. supports as far back as 5.8.5 still - specifically for the people stuck with old RHEL systems and similar.
While it's disappointing that you don't get to use a newer perl at work, you should still be able to play with most of the shiny modules. There's plenty of CPAN authors still happy to do the legwork to make that so, because we don't want to exclude a bunch of people just because their perl5 VM sucks.
