I agree with the author. Symfony 4 is the best PHP framework at the moment. Trying both Laravel and Symfony I think there is no need for Laravel (anymore). Laravel just has too much magic that will bite you later on. The only thing you should skip in both frameworks are 'annotations'. But this is easy to do.
You are 100% right about that. I've nearly tried almost all PHP frameworks, quite extensively I may add and at the end of the day I found that the less framework I use the better and faster my dev is. Now I just use packages from composer as needed and never ever use them anymore. For me Laravel was a nightmare to use with Vue. Both template engines (blade, vue) use moustache tags so everything has to be declared ins…
Routing
Templating
DB abstraction