Any tech that’s sufficiently popular and accessible is also lowering the bar for how good you have to be to use it. Very similar to React nowadays imo. It’s just a dead simple mental model, so it was everywhere.

Also, PHP has come a long way and is now cleaner and faster than it ever was. There’s a lot of weird bloat surrounding the standard library, but the basic syntax is surprisingly simple once you get your head around how arrays work.