I'm not sure you appreciate why PHP was successful. You might be completely right about all this, but the LAMP-stack "just upload this file to shared hosting" workflow is what made apps like WordPress win out, and the barrier remains significantly higher to do the equivalent with Rust.

Historically successful.

Draging a bunch of PHP files onto an FTP client is harder than modern dev practices.

If you've got a modern frontend of any kind, you're already beyond this.