After Perl I graduated to doing web stuff with a Microsoft Access (!) file stored in the disk alongside my .ASP scripts, exactly like one would do with sqlite today. It was quite performant.
I wonder if your "internet mentor" was the same as mine: Matt from Matt's Script Archive @ http://www.scriptarchive.com.
I tried to ask for msql or mysql, but were told 'no', that they were 'too heavy' for what we needed, so the folks doing perl were pushed back to the dark ages. We also weren't allowed to use 'shtml' - basic server side processing for things like 'include' to include common footers. Whenever we needed to make a footer change we had to write multiple search/replace scripts across dozens of client sites. The new 'asp' folks lauded this over us for a while with "look how advanced asp and Microsoft is - MS really gets the web". I showed what I'd been doing with PHP for 2-3 years at that point, with includes and more. But "well, that's not really powerful enough". Kept moving the goalposts.
tldr - there were many options for more advanced stuff than flat files back in the earliest web days, but often people were hamstrung by short sighted tech decisions made by people who were not responsible for actually delivering the work. has much changed in the past 25+ years? ;)
I received a panicked call from the admin that turned down my request. He wasn’t happy with me but understood the role he played in creating an expensive disaster.
Plenty of learning to go around in that experience :)
I don’t use MySQL or PHP for anything nowadays, but was extremely useful to learn in the early 2000s.