In my personal experience of being around back then, postgres and python were still considered "technically better", but such a massive pain in the ass to install (especially on cheap shared hosting where it was often actually impossible to install) that only the most masochistic people would even try. I myself wrote a fastcgi implementation in PHP which would allow a web server which only supported php to call python under the hood and forward the inputs and outputs :P
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:
