I disagree with the first sentence. In 199x the first people I knew making web pages dropped perl scripts, not C programs, into cgi-bin.
IIRC the spec itself says it was built for C applications.
mod-perl was a godsend, of course.
For example, it wasn't uncommon to have C extensions for Perl scripts dropped into CGI directory.
But the very first CGI scripts I wrote were in C, late 95 or early 96. Apache on Slackware Linux.