No, it's not historically inaccurate. mod_perl was fast, but no shared hosts offered it. So unless you wanted to shell out big bucks for a dedicated server, mod_perl wasn't much of an option. And if you wanted to write software to give away or sell to others, mod_perl certainly wasn't much of an option unless you wanted to only focus on a very small part of the market.

I personally transitioned from writing Perl CGI scripts to writing PHP scripts about (pause while I look through my records) 9 years ago, and it was exclusively for performance reasons (I still prefer Perl as a language). I was not alone in my thinking back then.