My experience from 1990 was it was the perfect language to add a bit of server-side logic to some raw HTML. So the niche (for me) was a nice transition from so

My experience from 1990 was it was the perfect language to add a bit of server-side logic to some raw HTML. So the niche (for me) was a nice transition from something I understood (HTML) to something new (dynamic webpages). In that way it is similar to batch files / bash scripts.