As much as I'm not a PHP fan these days, you are completely correct. In 2003, you had CFM (which MySpace actually used at first), Java (and probably some overly complex framework like Jakarta Struts to go with it), CGI, or the new ASP.net. For a college student to do a quick HTML doc with some code interspersed here and there, PHP sounds like the ONLY viable option that didn't have you spending money on licensing, or setting up some huge infrastructure.
I used PHP/MySQL too as it was just dead simple for most things.
Bingo. In 2003 PHP was the best option to get from zero to hero.