Come to think of it maybe some data historians at Google can look through the Googlebot logs and not only and compare the percent of websites that they think were .php-run (let’s say) over all this period, in both nominal and relative terms. It is my hunch that those websites represented a big chunk of Googlebot’s hit targets for most of Google’s (the company) existence, hence why I think my comment is valid (among other things)
My beef with such technologies... is not with the technologies at all. It's with the people that can't let go and can't recognize that things do change (or they are simply afraid that they have to learn new skills; many programmers are very risk-averse and are very average Joes and Janes just wanting to make a living and they hate the idea of having to learn their entire careers -- not sure if that's "fine" but it obviously works well for millions of them out there).
Same as with these old non-GNU UNIX tools zealots; some of them still fiercely are against the GNU tools... meanwhile a lot of the DevOps people I know (and no small amount of programmers, yours truly included) already move about 75% of their scripting workloads either to the newer Rust variants (rg, exa, fd-find, tuc, and many others) or lightweight quick script-friendly languages like Nim or OCaml.
So my broader point was: "we should utilize nostalgia as a driving force much less than we do right now". Hence my question.
I'll agree with you that the alternative bleak early-dystopian future that PHP et.al. prevented would be horrid and -- again -- I'd recognize the role of the early free / open-source tech as a positive driving force of the IT history.
What I'm trying to say is that those languages that everyone is quick to judge right now have given us 10, maybe 15 years of extra "life", a period when most of us have "made" our careers and, well, most of our money (those who have managed to make that money, that is). We wouldn't have had (what basically are) web companies worth tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars, if the web had still meant relying on Struts or on whatever it is Microsoft was putting forward as a web framework in the mid-2000s. We wouldn't have had engineers taking home TC worth 500-600k and then complaining that Python or Ruby are not what the world needs.