If you were a corporate/academic programmer at the time, or lucky enthusiast, you had access to more things. Most commoner folk stepping up to a local ISP shell from BBS did not have access to all kinds of goodies. There also was less formal education available, so even when technologies existed, without mainstream marketing and documentation, it simply wasn't accessible to the masses. Cold Fusion was proprietary software from Macromedia you had to pay for, as I recall. Some admins were restrictive, and didn't even like you compiling your own stuff.

PHP really was responsible for the dynamic web. It had enough community support to enable newbies to wrap their head around the mind-boggling shift to dynamic server-side websites, and it became commonly provided with cheap or free shared hosting.

A big reason why it succeeded was because it was possible for people who only understood HTML to transition, since a PHP file could be nothing but HTML to start with, and people used a lot of templating rather than start from scratch with code that echoed out HTML. With things like Perl, it was not an HTML templating script first, and so that made it less streamlined and simple for the task of making websites.