>The friction involved in getting those other technologies up and running was not trivial though.

That is only in relative terms in its time. For the past few years I keep thinking how the hell did Web Development went from Perl and CGI, arguably troublesome but understandable, to PHP which is ugly but easy to set up and running, to present days of... depending on which timeline you are, vagrant, VM, docker, k8s, Node.js... I would argue even Heroku with Ruby Rails isn't anywhere as easy as they were than the old days.

Indeed. I am much happier developing with Ruby on Rails than I was with say, PHP, but I do find it hilarious how back in the day deployment just meant uploading a couple of PHP files to a server and how now I need a full CI pipeline.

How so? As someone that's set them all up - with Apache the setup for mod_perl, php, and cgi are like the same right - they are all essentially cgi.

No, they are not the same as CGI. You can run PHP as a CGI, as many cheap hosts do, but for performance PHP is run as either Apache mod_php or php-fpm with Nginx. Mod_perl is not CGI and requires much more discipline to prevent shared memory leaks. Mod_perl allows content negotiation which CGI does not.

I remember it as a worse Perl, but with a bunch more web-batteries included. It's the latter that got me interested, way back in the day. Deployment story wasn't that different, aside from that cheap hosts were more likely to let you run PHP than Perl.