Really, I find that super cool tbh and would love to learn LISP as my first lang alongside Perl & Rust if that would help me gain a better handle on emacs in general.
Perl and Rust won't probably help you a lot with (E)lisp, but it never hurts to know more languages. If you want to learn Elisp, try reading the Elisp manual, and feel free to ask questions here if you don't get something. Just remember that a lot of Lisp-related stuff is simpler than it seems at first.
The idea that I could have multiple emacs tabs in my terminal, one on a project, one surfing the web and another on an I2P BBS just seems so cool to me
You can do all of that in one Emacs instance, there is no need for tabs. It might be better to use the GUI version of Emacs, as you'll have more keys to your exposure.
What exactly is this "org mode" I've been hearing so much about?
Fundamentally, it is a markup format with various Emacs integrations. So you can create links to open files, run code, etc. It's not a proper word-process in the WYSIWYG-sense, but you can easily export websites or PDFs if that is what you need.
I'd greatly appreciate any recommendations of some small novice or intermediate tier scripts/program ideas for perl that could be useful in the modern day to help me learn it,
Haven't used Perl in a while, but you could just try re-implementing standard Unix utilities (cat, ls, time, etc.) or writing scripts that might help you. Of course, since this is a Lisp/Scheme-adjacent Forum, I might recommend checking out Gauche Scheme, that can do a lot of things that Perl does too, just with (imo) cleaner syntax.