I thought Laravel was dead. Well looks like some people still like to use these slow and bloated frameworks. I cant say i miss the PHP ecosystem of bloat.
Laravel is far from dead; it's more popular than ever. The older versions that you might be familiar with have seen a lot of improvements over the last couple of years. They're fairly aggressive with deprecating older versions of PHP, while still supporting LTS versions.
Its ecosystem is really flexible, and generally has great solutions for anything web-related with easy configuration. I haven't found Laravel to be slow when building websites, but we always put a CDN in front of it, so it doesn't really matter how fast or slow the framework is.
If you want a lighter-weight core to start with, there's Lumen, which is designed to be an API-only version of Laravel. Forget templates, just return JSON (or whatever).
Laravel is a great solution for a lot of websites and applications. Maybe not some applications you have in mind, and that's ok. Pick the right tool for the job. As someone who used to hate PHP, modern Laravel would be my go-to if I need a backend and can't simply get by with a static site generator.
> If you want a lighter-weight core to start with, there's Lumen
It's been few years, but last time I tried it, the first thing it did was pulling close to 100 dependencies. I worked on few fairly large codebases (Symfony, Nette) and those were never even close to that. I realise it's not a good metric, but it really felt like an NPM project.
