I've got nothing against Laravel (other than Blade, and my own personal prejudice against ORMs and html generators), I use it and I like it a lot. I'm just saying a lot of what people seem to hate about PHP can be avoided without dependencies on much besides Symfony by way of Composer or even a framework at all - although this depends on how you define "framework."

Which is an interesting question in and of itself - what's the minimum viable feature set for a modern PHP framework? I would say a PSR autoloader, Composer and a url router, and everything else is superfluous. Most people wouldn't even count that as a microframework, and I understand that. And it probably wouldn't scale for crap either.

Although one thing I really like about laravel, which technically has nothing to do with laravel, is Artisan. Using .phar files as command line applications doesn't get as much attention as it should, maybe.