Comment by kugelblitz

Yeah, some things are still a mess, but many things I use constantly have improved so much. Here is an excerpt of a function that shows many of the updates that I use regularly:

  #[AsMessageHandler]
  readonly class JobEditedHandler
  {
      public function __construct(
          private Environment $twig,
          private EmailService $mailer,
          private string $vatRate,
      ) {}

      public function __invoke(JobEdited $jobEdited): void
      {
          $this->sendNotificationToJobPublisher($jobEdited);
      }

You have attributes, much better type-hinting, constructor property promotion, read-only properties / classes. Additionally you have native Enums, named arguments and also smaller things such as match expressions (instead of case switch), array spread operator, null coalescing assignment operator, etc, etc.

Especially in a CRUD-heavy setting like mine (I run a niche jobboard) it reduces so much boilerplate and increases type-safety, thus makes it way less error-prone. Combined with new static analyzers (phpstan, php-cs-fixer, psalm - take your pick), you find possible errors way earlier now.

I think it gets a lot of inspiration from Java. Symfony gets lots of inspiration from Spring Boot. The Twig templating language is heavily related to the Django templating language. So many of the tools and concepts are somewhat battle-tested.

And this is on top of the huge performance improvements in the last years.

So yeah, there's many things that are still fixable. But the improvements have been staggering.

Laravel was easier to get into but once you strayed from "The Laravel Way", it gets quite messy.

I got into Symfony by "accident", because a freelance colleague put me on projects that used Symfony. So for a couple of years I used Laravel and Symfony in parallel, but after a few years I decided to go full Symfony.

Some of the things that were better for my use case:

Many of the Laravel components are "Laravel only". Whereas in Symfony, you can just pick and choose the components you need - it's very modular and extendible without forcing your hand. You don't even need the Symfony framework and just choose the components you want.

That's how Laravel can depend on Symfony modules; but Symfony can't depend on Laravel modules.

Entities vs. Models (Data Mapper vs. Active Record): The entities in Symfony (equivalent to Models in Laravel) were just simple PHP objects. I can see what properties an entity has, I can configure directly there in a simple way. I can add my own functions, edit the constructor, etc, etc. Also: You create the properties, and the migrations were generated based on that. In Laravel, you create the migrations, and the actual model is based on going through the migration steps. This just feels odd to me.

In Laravel, the Models extend the Eloquent Model class and it feels "heavier" and I had more trouble re-configuring some things. Plus without using an additional "auto-complete" generator, I couldn't just see what the properties / columns of the model / table was.

I also don't like Facades (because they hide too much stuff and I have trouble figuring out the service that it actually represents).

Templating: I also like that Twig is more restrictive, it forces me to think more about separating logic and the view, whereas Blade allows way more things. You don't have to use it, but I reckon since it's allowed, people will do so.

One thing I still envy from Laravel, though, is the testing suite.

This is pretty neat:

    $response = $this->getJson('/users/1');
 
    $response
        ->assertJson(fn (AssertableJson $json) =>
            $json->where('id', 1)
                 ->where('name', 'Victoria Faith')
                 ->where('email', fn (string $email) => str($email)->is('victoria@gmail.com'))
                 ->whereNot('status', 'pending')
                 ->missing('password')
                 ->etc()
        );

I tried integrating it in Symfony, but it was quite messy and somewhat incompatible. That shows the above point, that it's "Laravel only". It's really nice, but not enough for me to advocate for Laravel over Symfony.