Laravel is pretty awesome, but in my opinion, I think it borrows too much from Rails, and it does too much. Just knowing how to use Composer, PSR and a url router will take care of, like, 80% of PHP's headaches (even though, yes, none of this is even necessary, it's still better.)
The bare metal lack of abstraction in PHP that other languages have to have but PHP doesn't can be one of its strengths.
I've got nothing against Laravel (other than Blade, and my own personal prejudice against ORMs and html generators), I use it and I like it a lot. I'm just saying a lot of what people seem to hate about PHP can be avoided without dependencies on much besides Symfony by way of Composer or even a framework at all - although this depends on how you define "framework."
Which is an interesting question in and of itself - what's the minimum viable feature set for a modern PHP framework? I would say a PSR autoloader, Composer and a url router, and everything else is superfluous. Most people wouldn't even count that as a microframework, and I understand that. And it probably wouldn't scale for crap either.
Although one thing I really like about laravel, which technically has nothing to do with laravel, is Artisan. Using .phar files as command line applications doesn't get as much attention as it should, maybe.
Do you know of any good standalone router libraries that aren't microframeworks? Specifically, support for placeholder values in URLs but dispatched through a controller setup, not a Callable for each route.
This would make the ultimate pico framework for PHP.
Offhand, no - I have one I wrote myself for prototyping but it basically just does callables (though it does support placeholders.) Support for controllers wouldn't be hard to add though.
The bare metal lack of abstraction in PHP that other languages have to have but PHP doesn't can be one of its strengths.