This is exactly it. Lower friction wins. You can just upload PHP scripts and go, while almost everything else requires many more installation steps or even monstrosities like Kubernetes.
The bulk of what I do is still, essentially, 'deploy to a folder'. There's some build steps, and a symlink swap from old to new, but that's still what it's doing. And I can still go edit a single file in a folder some place if I need to test/debug something. That's rare, but there are times when production is the only place an issue shows up (or... the only place you can replicate it - usually you can figure out enough from that to replicate locally later).
The more likely scenario is that a framework with a front controller is used, which is invoked by php-fpm, proxied by nginx.
It's easy enough to do, though.