i dunno, i wrote PHP scripts for the CLI that run a $100m+ business and execute many millions of times per day. PHP is great for things not web-related, i think many just didnt take the time to learn.
Does PHP have anything approaching CPAN? That is one of the key reasons I still dust off Perl for quick and dirty things from time to time, as well as the compact and accessible regex syntax.
I use php for small scripts that need to read csv and database lookup from the command line. It has built ins for these that work without any environment setup which is great sometimes.
Perl has some easy oneliners too. Depending on where I'm working sometimes I don't want to set up an environment.