Codeigniter popularity : why ?

Well, maybe we are going to repeat things here, because of the recent history of this framework, but i wanted to start a discussion about this : why Codeigniter is so popular, and the most important part : why Codeigniter stays among the most popular and most used PHP framework even in 2015 (http://www.sitepoint.com/best-php-framew...y-results/), even after being dropped by ellislab in 2013 and its development being stopped during months (even more than a year without a new release).

I just wanted to put words on that, because i find it incredible that nowadays, with the quick growth of languages and frameworks (javascript with angular, backbone, react etc. and server-side javascript with nodejs / express for example), this framework is always so popular. And to know the reasons why we kept going on with this framework, while Laravel or Symfony for example became more and more active meanwhile, and also more and more popular.

What's your opinion ?