A lot of people 10+ years ago were building websites by interpreting PHP and using the output as HTML. The language (at the time) seemed to encourage this. I agree that PHP is not a framework, but it seemed to have some opinion on how HTML was to be generated, which most languages don’t have. Also rails is 7 years older than Laravel, so my point still stands that PHP was behind the curve.
If your standard is rails then literally everything in every language before rails was "behind the curve". Currently PHP has frameworks that have caught rails, but Ruby's perf is still garbage.
Django was released shortly after Rails. Ruby and Python developers _needed_ to build something like Rails and Django because those languages didn’t promote the same type of script-as-html pattern that PHP did. Had more thought gone in to serving websites, PHP might enjoy more popularity today. PHP had the first mover advantage after all, but frameworks built in other languages were purely better in almost all categories.
