Even with those two options, you can't just write some code in a page and execute it without some sort of itermediate code.
Thats why php became so popular, perl coders could pick it up in a day ($ and all) and all you have to do is write .php files to a server - with the bonus that you have a rudimentary templating system built-in to php.
There really isn't much more to it than that.
Here we used mod_perl all over the place and it was glorious. It did take understanding how to use it - well, yes - same as the rest of perl (or apache for that matters). But it was so well integrated! I still miss it.
"Picking it up in one day" is not a criteria for professional deployements.
See >>45989369
Most people, including small businesses, used shared hosting providers back then, and none of them supported mod_perl, while most of them eventually did support mod_php. That's why PHP came to completely dominate the market for self-hosted (or hostable) web applications, like phpBB, Drupal, and WP--writing those in anything other than PHP after mod_php became available (but before AWS) made no sense. PHP was at least as ubiquitously supported as Perl, and through mod_php (avoiding CGI's overhead), much faster.
Once mod_perl existed (it was late, after lots of CGI perl) - I feel that my clients and I never had significant difficulty in finding providers. PHP was all over the place - it felt - more because there was demand. But there was enough demand for mod_perl that it was always there when we wanted it. We never had to really hunt for a hosting vendor.