I find it hard to imagine how anyone who groks Laravel well enough to get a product shipped could be deficient in understanding PHP. Surely such cases are outliers?
I regularly interview PHP developers for hiring and I can quickly classify them into 1. Wordpress Developers, 2. PHP developers and lately 3. Laravel developers.
Specifically for no 3 is the kind of developer who considers the framework magical and has no idea how things are done without it because they've learned framework first and the PHP basics to survive. They can do well for basic CRUD tasks but for anything trickier they get stuck.
