Well 25 years ago was pretty much (December 1998) when "LAMP"[1] was defined and that was originally Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.
So Postgres and Python were not the obvious choices back then.
So Postgres and Python were not the obvious choices back then.
It is kind of depressing that 25 years later, no other language has even attempted to compete with PHP in the “easy to get started on bargain-basement-tier shared web hosts” space D:
PHP has been very good at reinventing itself and being its own biggest competitor. Zend outcompeted PHP3, PHP5 outcompeted PHP4, PHP7 outcompeted PHP5 and so on. Compare a site written in modern idiomatic PHP8 using something like Laravel to a site written in classic PHP3 and they might as well be two different languages.
Not fashionable by any means - but still feasible to maintain unlike Windows IIS / C++ or Oracle / Perl / Flash.