> shake the baggage of being PHP

PHP is why WordPress was a success. PHP is available basically everywhere, for cheap. You can get a $5/month hosting plan that'll give you a VPS with mod_php and mysql and you'll be able to install WordPress. (Also, WordPress put some actual effort into having a quick-and-simple setup process. If you can upload some files onto a server, it can take it from there.) Thus anyone can trivially install WordPress.

There's "better" languages, but even today they tend to require more of you to get a working site deployed.