If you are thinking about building a web application, take a look at Laravel. I not a huge PHP user, but Laravel is always on the top of my list for building web applications. It's the greatest web framework to ever exists, even better than Rails IMHO. The ecosystem around Laravel is really incredible and unlike any other framework. They have libraries for every stage of a web application from taking payments all the…
For example, you don't need to use the ORM at all and can just use their query builder (which is pretty good). It's there if you want it, but the framework works happily without it and doesn't get in your way in that regard.
I inherited a Laravel codebase from a previous contractor and it was reasonably ergonomic to navigate and extend, because I was able to lean on the framework documentation to understand how it all worked. But there were several points where it was _not_ reasonable, because of Laravel/PHP magic and those were pretty painful to figure out and debug.
The reason I wouldn't choose it myself anymore is the magic, the little surprises and hard to debug idiosyncrasies that it provides in order to look pretty. Also generally Laravel, PHP and related ecosystems are moving too fast and are difficult to keep up to date without breaking and/or misunderstanding things. It's not quite JS/npm level of churn, but unnecessary regardless. A more minor point is the baseline performance tends to be on the lower end of what I need.
There are ecosystems out there that value stability and clarity more and provide better tools to test and debug the code if necessary, and I've come to appreciate those things much more with experience than other factors such as reducing the initial development time.