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> Surely systems programming is more popular than web? As you need a system to access the web, but not every system accesses the web...?

"Systems programming" != "Systems software".

Systems software is more widely used, but written by fewer people.

Systems programming is further down the layers of abstraction than Web Development is. As you go deeper and deeper down these layers there are fewer and fewer people solving the problems that the layers above depend on.

There are more web developers on this site than systems developers. What can you do in PHP that you can't do in C, or assembly, or binary...