Before PHP became widespread in the very late 90s there were many options for dynamic apps. I worked with ISPs which offered CGI or SSI even on cheap / free plans. Sure, it was ugly but a ton of people got what they needed done by going over to Matt's Script Archive and finding something they could hammer into shape. Before antique PHP apps, the security cliché was formmail.pl & a slew of long-forgotten guestbook / forum scripts.
I'm not saying that PHP didn't help considerably, only that it was very far from first. I remember having to make the case for using PHP 2 or 3 instead of many of those alternatives and it was based on cost and convenience, not the ability to do anything new.
You sound like an older hardcore nerd. You're from a different planet. What was going on in your circles was not at all a reflection of the web on a whole. Most people didn't even use ISPs in those times, they were on private systems like AOL. The dynamic web we know today, where almost every website is not static HTML, is because the majority of people making any little website had access to PHP, and free tutorials to learn.
PHP really was responsible for the dynamic web. It had enough community support to enable newbies to wrap their head around the mind-boggling shift to dynamic server-side websites, and it became commonly provided with cheap or free shared hosting.
A big reason why it succeeded was because it was possible for people who only understood HTML to transition, since a PHP file could be nothing but HTML to start with, and people used a lot of templating rather than start from scratch with code that echoed out HTML. With things like Perl, it was not an HTML templating script first, and so that made it less streamlined and simple for the task of making websites.