I used chroots, too, and it was useful but much harder to maintain than a container. Automation wasn't impossible, of course, but that was also complicated by concerns about bloating each chroot with copies of all of the system libraries & config files.
I used PHP in that era. It could be faster but then you're in the classic developer productivity tradeoff between, say, hand-coded SQL calls versus using an ORM, etc. The PHP frameworks which were comparable productivity-wise to Rails were also a lot closer to Rails performance-wise since they also had heavy abstractions, and they tended to have even more creative ways to create security holes. (I am feeling very old remembering arguing against enabling register_globals circa 1998)
