Since I no longer work on big projects, I actually prefer Codeigniter. It's just simpler and yes, it doesn't do nearly as much as Laravel and I'm OK with that.

Ha, this reminds me of a time I was proposing our team use Symfony rather than Laravel for a new project. It was such a battle.

Eventually I wrote up a document (I must have spent 20 hours on that thing) showing the pros and cons according to our needs and what each options offered. The gist of it was that Laravel was a nice wrapper over Symfony components at the time (though it did offer more as well, too - it just wasn't the more we needed), and since we were kind of like power users (data heavy backend with tens of thousands of users, rapidly growing), we should go direct to the source and use the Symfony components without any abstraction.

I mean, we shouldn't have been using PHP at all at the time, but what can you do.

Literally no one arguing for Laravel knew it was based around the Symfony components. Once the CTO saw that and heard me out, we didn't actually end up reviewing the Laravel option at all. I was so relieved.

Those were weird times. I'm not sure how much Laravel has changed since then. At the time it was kind of like an easy way to build simple stuff fast, but it didn't strike me as a great tool for our use case. We needed to make the most performant php-based booking system possible, and some basic benchmarking showed that Laravel introduced some incredible performance penalties that didn't make any sense for us.

Sometimes I miss that product. It had massive potential. I still stumble across it while booking stuff. The UI has barely changed. I suspect they haven't made many changes or made much progress since I left 7 years ago. I really wanted to build it into something better.

Long story short: Laravel wasn't the right choice for that kind of application, no one who wanted to use Laravel had any idea about its architecture but argued with me about it for weeks, haha. Write detailed documents to support your case, it works wonders.

Laravel hasn't changed much. I mean, it did, PHP also changed a lot in the last years but the whole idea behind the framework is the same. Full of features, easy to set up, many tools built around Laravel to deploy your app, to build your own SaaS, etc but it's highly opinionated, you have to do it their way.

Symfony on the other hand takes more work but it's more flexible. One of internal apps is made with Symfony and after working on it for a couple years, if I had to set up the whole thing again I wouldn't know how.