Django isn't MVC, it's an entirely different architecture. Symfony framework is heavily inspired by Spring [1], and modern frameworks like Laravel heavily influenced by it and extensively use its libraries.
>You don't have the whole dependency injection lifecycle thing to grasp which isn't easy for someone who never seen it before.
Laravel's core is built on a DI container and extensively uses that throughout. Service providers [2] are a key concept to Laravel, which requires you to directly interact with the DI container.
What do you mean by this? I can take a guess, and it seems like you're upset PHP has progressed beyond its humble beginnings as a templating language into a fully fledged OOP language with frameworks rivaling Spring, such as Symfony and Laravel. Sure, PHP has its issues, but so does Java if you want to go that route. I still can't find an answer that doesn't point to poor design as to why in Java a Stack is a class but Queue is an interface. Java also didn't get generics until v5, which is now probably one of the most definitive features of the language. Java has changed a lot since its inception. If it weren't for modules and (especially jlink) being introduced in java 9 we'd still be dealing with massive production jars. Java has changed a ton and so has PHP, both for the better.
>having it's major frameworks become so heavily inspired by Spring isn't what PHP used to be.
Inspired by doesn't mean the same as. It's no different than any other non-DI frameworks unless you want to write framework-specific packages. Laravel has DI under the hood but you don't have to write annotations nor structure your code in a certain way to be able to use it. It does all of that for you.
>And again, if I have a type annotated codebase which is more and more a Spring clone, why wouldn't I just use Spring? What's the upshot to go with PHP + Symfony then?
They're far easier to use with less overhead. You don't need to know tons of annotations and configurations to get requests to behave a certain way. You've already admitted earlier that you've never used Laravel nor Symfony, so I'm not sure why you're arguing about their ease of use when you don't have experience with either. They're significantly easier to use than Spring.
PHP runs right out of the box. As long as apache is running and you have an index.php file in your www directory, it just runs. Spring Boot is a pleasure to deploy as well with embedded tomcat, it's possibly even simpler than PHP for local development because you can just give a jar to someone and it works no differently than it would in production.