[einhverfr]

I wouldn't say they are totally dead. They are great for relatively quick/dirty code.

The major advantage that CGI gives you is the fact that you get a new, clean process on each request. This means you have fewer and simpler failure cases. This can be helpful when you have a line of business web application though it is certainly suboptimal for public-facing scalable systems.

I wouldn't say cgi is dead. It still has a role to play. It is not the ideal way for doing many things though. I.e. they are no longer the go-to tool, but rather one tool for relatively lower-volume applications where performance matters less than some other considerations.