[em-bee]

the reason is that php was accessible. it provided the bridge between pre coded serverside includes and writing your whole website in code, which you would have had to do with any other language. nowadays many things that php made easy can also be done with client side javascript.

i remember a conversation with a php core developer who conceded that one of the problems in the php community is a large number of inexperienced developers. it is similar problem that javascript faces today, but that, thanks to AI is going to affect more and more languages.

php itself is not a bad language, i use it too if it is appropriate, but it also has improved over the decades. so nowadays i am more likely to use php than i would have been a few decades ago.