That hasn’t always been there. Or of it has, then the maintainers haven’t ever done anything with bug reports because there have been errors in the docs for the entire life of 5.x.
I don’t really recall earlier versions of PHP being any better either. So I really don’t think PHP became popular because of the docs.
The other comments about how it was easy to learn and easy to deploy is far more accurate. If I recall correctly, back when PHP gained traction, your main options then were Perl (which understandably confused the hell out of a lot of people), ASP (VBScript / JSScipt and requires Windows NT + IIS so not a popular option) or JSP (Java and at that time was pain to deploy. So not something you’d expect a casual web developer to bother with). So PHP is like BASIC or Raspberry Pi of the 90s web. It was made for one specific job, it didn’t do it perfectly, but it was cheap, easy to learn and just about good enough to get the job done.
I don’t really recall earlier versions of PHP being any better either. So I really don’t think PHP became popular because of the docs.
The other comments about how it was easy to learn and easy to deploy is far more accurate. If I recall correctly, back when PHP gained traction, your main options then were Perl (which understandably confused the hell out of a lot of people), ASP (VBScript / JSScipt and requires Windows NT + IIS so not a popular option) or JSP (Java and at that time was pain to deploy. So not something you’d expect a casual web developer to bother with). So PHP is like BASIC or Raspberry Pi of the 90s web. It was made for one specific job, it didn’t do it perfectly, but it was cheap, easy to learn and just about good enough to get the job done.