Back in the day, PHP was exciting. It was free, it was powerful, it was easy to learn. Everyone coming out of college knew C anyway and it has a similar structure. You could suddenly give your circa 1999 web pages a page date in REAL TIME and you could respond to forms without nasty cgi-bin. Eureka!

Nobody gets excited about it anymore because it solved the problem it was aiming to solve a long, long time ago.