One component is the fact that it comes out of the box on a great many hosting providers and it's part of the old "standard" LAMP stack. You don't have to set up any reverse proxy crap and the architecture is simple enough - you access a .php file which is really just HTML with some embedded code and it interprets the file. The concept couldn't be any closer to JavaScript which I suspect has attracted so much attention from beginners just because it's everywhere on web clients, just as PHP is everywhere on web servers.

Well, my guess is that PHP offers a lot more to the beginner.

When you've been doing this a while, you can appreciate what e.g. Python gives you in structure, maintainability, and lack of foot-guns.

But when you're still in the "how does this work? Why won't this work? It worked!" phase, having less boilerplate, and fewer non-problem domain concerns (types? modules? tuples? Say what you mean, Old Man!) might be really valuable.

I think the best thing I remember about PHP is probably its online manual. Each library function had a few full use cases underneath.