It's humorous to think every random person on HN is working on a site that gets more traffic than Slashdot did in 1999. A site that ran on mod_perl and, by modern standards, fairly basic hardware.
And for the most part, CGI went on the decline the day mod_perl came out. Which was 1996. So we really didn't use basic CGI for that long. The popularity of putting Perl right in Apache eclipsed running standalone Perl via CGI. It would be at least another decade before the world started to move on from this arrangement (mod_php or mod_perl).
By which you mean, "Almost every website in the Universe which isn't actively being DDoSed" with the understanding that essentially nobody can stand up to a modern, competent DDoS.
> Per Murphy's Law, of course, everything is fine until one day the internal app goes public and suddenly there are 500 queries a second.
Omae wa mou shindeiru. You are already dead.