Yeah PHP was the first time web applications really "clicked" for me because there were not a hundred layers of abstractions between the html page and the application code. I was new to programming, and I took a look at J2EE and its literal million lines of code pet store that was supposed to be the shining example of how to do J2EE right, and I was like wtf is all of this... PHP though it was so easy to just make a page that gets some stuff from a DB, does some stuff with it, and outputs the result. I didn't need to read a 500 page book to get started with it.
In the end, PHP wasn't great, but around 2000 it was a great intro to building things on the web.
Having lived through that era, J2EE was ultimately a disaster. I remember an "entity bean" (terrible name for a class that manages data persistence) requiring multiple java files and at least a couple XML configuration files. It was complete madness. It was slow to build, slow to deploy, slow to run.