Mason was great, but it'd have needed to be accompanied with an easy-as-adding-a-different-document-extension scheme installed by default w/ mod_perl on commodity hosting in order to have saved Perl's popularity vs PHP.
The big thing for PHP was how easy it was to go from "I've got a static HTML document that looks like what I want!" to "I've just added a tiny bit of dynamic content by sprinkling in a special tag!" on the majority of unix-based hosts. Deployment was uploading via FTP, just like it was with HTML. There's just so little conceptual distance or friction between static HTML and dynamic document/app, the pit of success is right there to fall into (granted, the peak of further success has some rocky roads out of that pit, but by then you've got momentum!).
On commodity hosting, Perl got typecast as a CGI tool instead. Which had its own power (CGI is kinda the OG serverless)... but not as easy a jumping off spot for anybody who was doing HTML.
The big thing for PHP was how easy it was to go from "I've got a static HTML document that looks like what I want!" to "I've just added a tiny bit of dynamic content by sprinkling in a special tag!" on the majority of unix-based hosts. Deployment was uploading via FTP, just like it was with HTML. There's just so little conceptual distance or friction between static HTML and dynamic document/app, the pit of success is right there to fall into (granted, the peak of further success has some rocky roads out of that pit, but by then you've got momentum!).
On commodity hosting, Perl got typecast as a CGI tool instead. Which had its own power (CGI is kinda the OG serverless)... but not as easy a jumping off spot for anybody who was doing HTML.