Anecdotally, in my 20+ years of working for website and web app companies, I have never had a client who has even suggested a specific way of implementing an app. The closest has been when a client has asked for a tech proposal and had it sanity checked by a third party. These days I mostly work on "rescuing" apps that a client has had built by one company, found it hasn't gone well, and has come to the company I work for to make it work properly. All of the crazy tech stack implementations I've seen have come from developers who think they're clever, and never the client demanding something trendy.
Wasn’t any Ansible then, either, you had to write your own damn scripts.
In contrast, competing technologies started out with, "OK, learn computer science. Now learn how HTTP works. And then learn CGI. And some Unix. And then you can do 'Hello, World.'"
The funny part for me is that a lot of us in the latter camp didn't learn computers that way at all. We started out with BASIC:
10 PRINT "Onion2K is cool!"
20 GOTO 10
How many people had rented servers for games? A lot. Now video game companies have turned game servers into a SaaS, whereas then they just released Linux server binaries. In the early 2000s there was a bare metal server rental company on every other street corner.
How many people had Linux/BSD network appliances? Also a lot. There was such a time when all you got from the cable or telco for your broadband service was a modem, and you had to roll your own router/switch. There were a multitude of run-from-a-floppy (or USB stick) BSD and Linux router distros back then.
Also, you're not correct on PHP. The entire reason PHP grew so wildly was because it was server side rendered, and both AOL and Microsoft intentionally hindered their browsers' javascript capabilities in lame attempts to monopolize the internet.
They read lot of 'buzzword' on the internet or heard them from their tech friend and ask for everything i.e. Microservice Architecture and cloud and all and etc. since beginning. Resulting in unnecessary huge team and tech complexity. An idea or poc which could had been easily done and tested in market with small techstack/small team. No wonder lot of these products fail.