PHP won because it was easy to install and restrict (by memory usage) on shared servers, as well as the fact that writing a PHP script was as simple as renaming an .html file to .php so web designers who wanted some dynamic functionality could use it really easily.
As bad as some aspects of PHP were, making it so trivial to install and make available on a server was a brilliant move that lots of languages could still learn from today.
If you have a project you want to become popular putting real work in to the initial onboarding is vital.
The parent nailed it. It's easy to complain about PHP from various standpoints both pragmatic and PL-centric, but it has an amazing superpower which might be summed as "serverless for the web, v0".
No deployment setup will ever match the pure joy of dragging a .php file into WinFTP, watching the little blue progress bar, and refreshing your browser.
I practically have that level of “luxury” in my Awful[0] (CHICKEN Scheme) web app that I’m working on right now. With a couple lines of code[1] added to my project (that I have only running in development mode), I can simply save my source code file in Emacs, have it automatically saved on the server through Emacs’s TRAMP feature, reload the page in Firefox, and instantly see my changes. If I like it, I make a commit through magit and I’m off to the next task.
Of course, I don’t run it like this in production (to refresh the production app I have to go to "/reload" from a certain IP address and be logged into the admin account).
Don’t worry: the “old ways” are still here, even if no longer mainstream.
Yes, if your tsconfig is sufficiently permissive it will simply give any imports for which it can't find a type definition the 'any' type and assume that you can do anything you like with them. Obviously this doesn't give you any help from the type checker but it will work fine and you can go back and add typings later when you decide you need them.
As bad as some aspects of PHP were, making it so trivial to install and make available on a server was a brilliant move that lots of languages could still learn from today.
If you have a project you want to become popular putting real work in to the initial onboarding is vital.