Back in the day it was Perl or PHP on the web

I was a Perl programmer, and I looked down my nose at PHP. Silly me, then and now

Why did PHP, an objectively a worse language, win?

Rasmus Lerdorf said in a quote I can no longer find, it was modperl vs. modphp for Apache.

Modperl was, typically for Perl, very comprehensive and allowed access to all the Apache processing hooks

Modphp was, typically for PHP, just enough to speed up rendering so only allowed access to the barest minimal set of hooks

Modperl, so much better (I can hear myself say 30 years ago)

But at the time most websites, by count not by traffic, ran on shared hosts where the system administrator gave you access to software. If they installed mosdperl you would be able to intercept, read, and change traffic for all websites hosted on that machine

Modphp, not so.

So PHP was widely available to the pioneers in the day, people scratching together a little web hosting business and growing . Perl was not

Not enough on its own to kill Perl, but an important nail in its coffin