My issue isn't with PHP as a language. It’s with frameworks that try to do everything for everyone, and end up adding layers of abstraction, indirection, and performance overhead by default — even before you write your first line of app logic.
Symfony, like Laravel, is very capable — but to me, it’s too prescriptive. You either embrace the full stack or fight against the grain. I wanted something where:
- Every module but the core is optional - No need to use the CLI, just drag and drop and it handles it
The templating system, cache, and routing all talk directly
So I wrote Dataphyre — modular, dependency-free, fast as hell. It powers a 3.5M-line ecommerce platform (Shopiro) with a sharded replicated containerized CDN system able of 8k streaming, a fulltext search engine, the "usual" templating and async, all built in.
Relying on such heavy tested is a no brainier for me, especially because it offer well designed abstractions. You seem to see them as dragging you down, I see them as opportunity to have hooks at the right place for free.