Ruby on Rails, 2005. That's MVC for ruby.
Zend Framework, 2006. That's MVC for PHP. phpBB, 2001. MVC for PHP. But not generalized, specific usecase only.
Backbone.js, 2010. That's MVC for JS.
Sounds to me like in 2005 the web was pretty wild westy in terms of separating data from views and application logic.
Struts for Java, 2000.
Spring for Java, 2002.
MVC is just a pattern, generalized in 1988, and even in websites without frameworks plenty of developers have structured their code accordingly prior to 2005. It is certainly more popular after 2005.
Most pointedly, 2003 for seeing that in a PHP (4.x!) codebase is not a typo. Zend was definitely not the beginning of MVC being applied with PHP, even if it might have been the highest profile example at its release.
And that's just for MVC. Various other kinds of discipline for separating display output and application logic go back into the 90s.
If the west seemed wild, it's probably more because developers like to homestead than because there weren't any maps pointing to civilization.
On the Java front we had 'Model 2' frameworks like Struts 1. Struts 2 was brand new. Oracle had ADF and pushed it pretty hard. JSF was fairly new and nearly no one used it.
ColdFusion offered a complete package and was actually not terrible. MySpace was written in CF.
There was always ASP.NET.
But if you weren't coding in Java, CF, or ASP, you were using some bespoke not-yet-framework. I'd say 'wild wild west' is an apt description.