>I disagree. PHP was always supposed to be beginner friendly, fast to prototype, dynamic etc.
>having it's major frameworks become so heavily inspired by Spring isn't what PHP used to be.
Inspired by doesn't mean the same as. It's no different than any other non-DI frameworks unless you want to write framework-specific packages. Laravel has DI under the hood but you don't have to write annotations nor structure your code in a certain way to be able to use it. It does all of that for you.
>And again, if I have a type annotated codebase which is more and more a Spring clone, why wouldn't I just use Spring? What's the upshot to go with PHP + Symfony then?
They're far easier to use with less overhead. You don't need to know tons of annotations and configurations to get requests to behave a certain way. You've already admitted earlier that you've never used Laravel nor Symfony, so I'm not sure why you're arguing about their ease of use when you don't have experience with either. They're significantly easier to use than Spring.
>having it's major frameworks become so heavily inspired by Spring isn't what PHP used to be.
Inspired by doesn't mean the same as. It's no different than any other non-DI frameworks unless you want to write framework-specific packages. Laravel has DI under the hood but you don't have to write annotations nor structure your code in a certain way to be able to use it. It does all of that for you.
>And again, if I have a type annotated codebase which is more and more a Spring clone, why wouldn't I just use Spring? What's the upshot to go with PHP + Symfony then?
They're far easier to use with less overhead. You don't need to know tons of annotations and configurations to get requests to behave a certain way. You've already admitted earlier that you've never used Laravel nor Symfony, so I'm not sure why you're arguing about their ease of use when you don't have experience with either. They're significantly easier to use than Spring.