I agree with you. Symfony and composer in general has just turned our code base into some kind of fugly java like monstrosity.
When I used composer the first time I really enjoyed it, that project also used Silex a minimalistic symfony2, which I also really liked. But what I found out is that in general it is really terrible to be dependent on others, as Silex was dropped by Potencier and my project is left in limbo, sadly. Its very sad because its one of the coolest things I ever worked on, and its still in use today many years after. But I am worrying that some time in the feature, a vulnerability or problem with Silex comes up, the company will have to rewrite the project completely some day.
I worked alot with Drupal7, absolutely hated it mostly because the hook system was hard to remember and performance of Drupal7 in general was absolutely terrible. Then I tried Drupal8 and though some changes are welcome, some stuff are just so god damn complicated, a task that would have been as simple as a few lines of code becomes pages of boiler plate, EventSubscribers and YML config files.
PHP used to be a good choice because it was rapid application development on crack cocaine, developers were cheap and diverse in skill and background.
I still think there is SOME use for PHP, I personally like it for shell scripts mostly because im so familiar with it. I used it alot the past 10 years for making stuff fast for friends and personal use I guess its also a decent beginner language for web development, though javascript would be higher on my list today because of the obvious front end relation.