[dagw]

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.

[The_Colonel]

IIRC the big break was betweem PHP 4 and PHP 5, they had very different object model. Otherwise the it's not that different.