These comments gave me an extreme nostalgic feeling. It's like it's early 2000 again when everyone that could operate a keyboard would try to make his own dynamic site with PHP (read as: copy&paste some "guestbook" code from a tutorial). Oh, the memories and fun we had with those ...
Hehe, my first open source “project” was a comment box written in PHP, circa 2004 at the age of 13… It used a single txt file for storing the comments, so I’m afraid it wasn’t webscale™, but I didn’t know better at the time :]
Don't sell yourself short, it was probably more efficient than the wobbling tower of npm packages and ajax requests most comment systems are made of today.