Yup, since that was only a few months ago, the current repost counts as a dupe.

Reposts are fine after a year or so. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

The preface ends with the original authors names, so yes, I’d say they are behind the new edition.

Kernighan also lists the updated edition at the top of his web page

Prior to Perl most text processing was done with unix pipelines and awk/sed/C. So Perl allowed people to stop writing C and also stop using lots of separate programs to do one thing. Many of the awk constructs survive in Perl such as running code once per line, // for regular expressions which implicitly work on the current line, $1/$2/$3 etc. so it's not too difficult to use Perl instead of awk.

Awk was always a tool for use in shell scripts and one liners, and is still going strong.

Perl, not so much.