On one hand I find Laravel to be a nicely designed piece of software that does what it sets out to do well, on the other I think monolithic frameworks are a bit out-of-date and don’t really fit a language like PHP.
Take Node and Golang for example as two newer technologies, they both favour small frameworks and then adding to that with packages/libraries, which makes sense in a world where it has become more and more common to handle much of the work on the frontend with React/Vue/Angular.
Then you have that PHP would seem contradictory to the notion of monolithic frameworks, this is a technology where basically you have to boot and tear down the app each request, something that would be far more fitting for smaller frameworks rather than monoliths like Laravel.
Seems to me for many years PHP has always been a bit behind the trend in technology, just look at how long it took to get Composer and then for it to become standard in the PHP community, way too long compared to NPM, PIP, etc. I see Symfony is trying to move away from the monolith and I think the PSR standards help, but still, PHP seems to still be behind the curve in this regard.
