It would help if web frameworks that have precious little to do with MVC would stop trying to piggy-back on the term. For example, if your model, view and controller have a control flow that makes them three layers in a stack, with the controller sitting between the model and the view, then your architecture is not really anything like MVC at all.

The common architectural pattern for web apps where you have a request handler that talks to a database and then generates its output by filling in a template is popular and widely applicable. However, I think the way some of these frameworks tried to hijack a well-established term for publicity in the early days has come back to haunt them now they are better known. Today, if someone wants to learn how to use these web frameworks, particularly the common underlying concepts and design skills, and searches for "MVC", they find a whole load of other information that doesn't really make sense in the context of web apps.

Similarly, anyone who really does want to learn MVC in a context where it is more applicable -- including designing larger JS-based applications that run primarily in-browser, for example -- comes up against a lot of material that is in some cases almost the antithesis of MVC, which doesn't help there either.

When the most common reasonably simple architecture beyond PHP's everything-is-a-template starts off at such a disadvantage, it's not really surprising that many people struggle to understand the basics and just stick with PHP's "it just works" instead, despite the other disadvantages they suffer in making that choice.