I don't agree. PHP was a quick shot to grab market share from Perl and other web development languages used at the time. While Rasmus may have developed it in good faith to bring easy web site programming to the masses, PHP is the single piece of software standing out for countless DDoS attacks making life difficult for web site owners of PHP and non-PHP web sites alike, and driving folks to centralized services such as CloudFlare.

PHP's original use case is dynamic HTML generation from HTML/SGML processing instructions embedded in otherwise static HTML. That's useful, but PHP's lack of HTML-aware template expansion and escaping mechanisms was and is bordering on the criminal IMHO.