Pixar should make a film called "Deployment Story" in which PHP is basically Woody (maybe it's even just the PHP stuffed elephant?), and Woody ends up in the box on the street, and then Woody's dev pal doesn't realize what they've really lost until some reflection is done. I'd watch that.

This reads better when reflection is used in both meanings.

There has to be a Debian angle to this plot as well.

Interestingly, that has been the case for 25 years or so now but none except perl was able to do that?

Perl's not unique in that way. Any language can talk cgi. That's literally the purpose of cgi. Perl was just the popular scripting language of the day.

If you're using something other than cgi to get your httpd to talk to your webapp, your answer lies in understanding the architectural decisions of that tool.

Do PHP applications really require no system packages for any use-cases?

PHP is pretty batteries-included, sometimes to a fault (it comes with things like 3 different MySQL drivers in the standard library). I'm sure there are cases where you'd want to install a C extension that depended on some system library, but I can't actually think of any right now.

imagick for imagemagick is a common one. but yeah, you can go really far with just relying on php standard features

What do you mean by system packages? There are PHP packages now and Composer. Though core and its bundled extensions are quite rich. So 3P packages aren't strictly necessary.

It is also JSX before JSX was invented too :-)