yeah, i'm British, and I kind of mean 'cool kids' to be a slightly self-deprecating ironic phrase. I meant that all the people I knew that were doing more interesting things seemed to be doing perl, so I followed that path. Filter bubbles were still a thing, even with less online communities

Yup, PHP back then had one of the best documentation pages out there. It's hard to explain how big a deal it was(esp before the days of stack overflow).

Absolutely! I honestly think that if PHP didn't have those incredibly accessible documentation pages, it would never have taken off in the way it did. It was StackOverflow before there was StackOverflow.

Yes it was a stroke of genius for php to add user comments to the bottom of the page describing each function/method etc. the examples in those comments were often much better than the documentation itself. I remember in early 2000s trying to persuade someone at CPAN to add comments to the bottom of CPAN, but they didn't get that they actually had to be on the page at the bottom for anyone to read them.

In the late 90's the cool kids where using python. I was on the Perl bandwagon and in 1999 I bought "Learning Python" and never wrote a line of Perl again.