The if (!$result) code block is not

The if (!$result) code block is not running, so clearly $result came back as something
other than false. But the while loop never ran; you never saw any results.
But wait a second. Your query was a CRE ATE query. What rows would be returned
from that sort of query? There wouldn’t be any rows, because you weren’t asking
for rows. You were just asking MySQL to create a table; in fact, a place to put rows.