Yep. I was doing Perl CGI scripts at the time, and you often ran into deployment issues somewhere along the line of uploading the scripts via FTP, making them executable, and setting the permissions on any files that needed to be written. Building PHP into the web server instead of external CGI scripts eliminated a lot of that, so it was more likely to just work without some back-and-forth with a web admin to get things setup right for CGI to work. It wasn't the language, but the way it was deployed.
Yes! This was huge. You could go from coding to uploading to refreshing your application as fast as you could perform those actions. And don’t forget, with Perl CGI, you had to output the right Content-Type header (and two carriage returns) at the top of your outputted page content for the browser to even parse it correctly.