Typically I've run cgi from a directory outside the document root. That's easy, and I think was the defaults?

That said, fork+exec isn't the best for throughput. Especially if the httpd doesn't isolate forking into a separate, barebones, child process, fork+exec involves a lot of kernel work.

FastCGI or some other method to avoid forking for each request is valuable regardless of runtime. If you have a runtime with high startup costs, even more so.

Yep, that is definitely problematic. But it also allowed a sprawling ecosystem of tons of small applications that people could just download and put on their website via FTP and do the configuration in the browser afterwards.

This is easy enough for non-technical people or school kids and still how it works for many Wordpress sites.

The modern way of deploying things is safer but the extra complexity has pushed many, many folks to just put their stuff on Facebook/Instagram instead of leveling up their devops skills.

Somehow we need to get the simplicity back, I think. Preferably without all the exploits.

What kind of problems? Like, if the administrator put something inside that directory (Unix doesn't have folders) that the web server shouldn't execute? That kind of problems? I've literally never had that problem in my life and I've had web pages for 30 years.