[marcus0x62]

I have no idea why someone would use one now. In the mid-90’s it was pretty much the only practical cross-language way to create dynamic web content. Someone certainly could have written their CGI program as a separate web server, but:

1. proxy support was limited or non-existent in the main webservers that existed at the time, so routing the request over would have been a problem.

2. there were no frameworks to speak of to make any of this easier. CGI.pm would help parse and decode GET and POST data. That was just about all there was. There was no PHP (as it exists now,) no Rails, no http frameworks like actix-web. Nothing.

“Inefficient and prone to break” is an excellent description of CGI. Most practical people moved away from as quickly as possible.