The apathetic response is, of course, "there is no point." If you allowed a login over normal HTTP, then the password was transmitted free & clear over the wires, and anyone sniffing on those wires could see it. Therefore, using PHP to encrypt the password before storing it in a database is silly, as the password has already been exposed.
However, there is another kind of response, which is that having one chink in the armor is no excuse to drop the armor and do battle naked. A good PHP developer isn't going to let one mistake snowball into a whole bunch of mistakes. Security isn't a guarantee, it's a deterrent. If you make life difficult for the bad guys, they may go find easier prospects. There are "grades" of difficulty you can accept, but the more secure you go, the less convenient it is. For example, you can disallow any dictionary-based passwords on your system, to try to prevent brute-force dictionary attacks (someone runs a script to try every word in a dictionary as the password), but then it's harder for people to remember their passwords. You make things too restrictive, and people find alternatives. So developers and sysadmins are daily making decisions like this, trying to find a balance, knowing that some protection is a better deterrent than a wide-open system.
In addition, encryption is sometimes meant to protect from internal threats, such as disgruntled employees, BOFH, whatever. Consider this. An upset employee might copy a file on his way out the door. Or a DBA might get curious one day, and start perusing the database. Will they bother to set up a packet sniffer on the lines? No, they don't have time or ability to pull off all that work undetected. But an easy glance at the database? Maybe. So, like an arms race, you just escalate the defenses to make things more difficult for an "inside job."
Of course, protecting your data from internal threats while leaving the data open to attack from outsiders isn't exactly a "comprehensive" security policy, but it's clear that crypt and HTTPS are offering different kinds of protection, meant to address different sides of the same coin.
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