I have not written a new PHP app in years but recently I had a look at the latest and greatest from the PHP community and its pretty good. The frameworks and tooling look about as good as you will get anywhere and PHP appears to be fast now.

As someone who was about to ditch the PHP ecosystem 6 years ago for something like Rails... frameworks like Laravel absolutely changed the PHP ecosystem.

Also since the release of PHP 7.0, core development seems to have really picked up with good stuff in every release (7.3 was just released a few months ago).

I just do not understand the fascination with Laravel. When the first version of Laravel was released Symfony was already lightyears ahead.

The only thing Laravel had going for it was that you could take more shortcuts, and it was a pain to integrate into any IDE if you wanted decent autocompletion.

Laravel is not what it used to be either -- Laravel 5 is far more capable/usable than Rails or Django. It's ecosystem is vaster, much stronger community, better docs, faster -- pretty much every state it's better than it's competitors.

Not an end-all be-all, but worth noting: https://github.com/topics/framework