That’d make sense to me, deleting the old images and letting them just be on backpan. That should allow whatever tooling depends on recent releases being in the regular CPAN mirrors to still work.
Looking at 3 days of www.cpan.org <http://www.cpan.org/> logs only the most recent development image seems to have been downloaded more than the background noise of everything getting a request now and then because web crawlers. (And the most recent development image by just number of downloads recently is less popular than about a dozen very old not-development releases). I put a CSV of the counts of “perl5-“ URLs temporarily at https://tmp.askask.com/os/cpan/cpan-perl-downloads-2022-04-05-02_13_21.csv <https://tmp.askask.com/os/cpan/cpan-perl-downloads-2022-04-05-02_13_21.csv> Ask
