Someone who picked their tools with good tech judgement 25 years ago can be using the same today (eg PG, Python, Linux) without corporate control of them, it's pretty great.
That feels a bit like hindsight talking. Linux perhaps, but were Python and Postgres really the obvious good judgement choices 25 years ago? Every other choice was poor judgement?
In my personal experience of being around back then, postgres and python were still considered "technically better", but such a massive pain in the ass to install (especially on cheap shared hosting where it was often actually impossible to install) that only the most masochistic people would even try. I myself wrote a fastcgi implementation in PHP which would allow a web server which only supported php to call python under the hood and forward the inputs and outputs :P
It is kind of depressing that 25 years later, no other language has even attempted to compete with PHP in the “easy to get started on bargain-basement-tier shared web hosts” space D:
no other language has even attempted to compete with PHP
PHP has been very good at reinventing itself and being its own biggest competitor. Zend outcompeted PHP3, PHP5 outcompeted PHP4, PHP7 outcompeted PHP5 and so on. Compare a site written in modern idiomatic PHP8 using something like Laravel to a site written in classic PHP3 and they might as well be two different languages.
That's how you airdrop straight into the worst of the python 2 3 fiasco, probably the worst time in history to start using python, meanwhile when Ruby on Rails and Java were probably the kings of that era.
Around 20 years ago when I was trying to decide on what database to use my requirement were that it should store data reliably. I learned that MySQL in contrast to PostgreSQL:
1. wasn't ACID
2. didn't have foreign key constraints
3. could loose/corrupt committed data (no WAL)
Despite me not knowing much about databases it seemed like an obvious choice.
Hell, 10 years ago (in a multi database project) I got bit by MySQL not supporting check constraints, but returning successfully when I ran the create check constraint statements.
It finally supports them, which is nice. It doesn't support deferred checks to the commit, like postgres, but are otherwise good. I've appreciated using it to enforce json schema at the db level
MySQL didn't have transactions (for many years after that), so PG over MySQL would have been the case for "good technical judgement" though maybe not the majority choice. For Python, maybe I'm biased - but you could have went for PHP in the argument if you swing that way and it still works.