Laravel and Symfony are both extremely good, and the only reason people don't use them tends to be out of misplaced arrogance. Unsurprisingly, they end up building their own awful framework, and at some point the project either dies or someone says "Erm, we should put this in Laravel".
There are some people who've built great projects without these frameworks, and there are many projects in these frameworks that are terrible. But in terms of probabilities, you've got a much better chance of a project being well-built if it's in Symfony or Laravel.
There just is so much legacy in the PHP world that separating the wheat from the chaff in itself becomes tedious. And don't understand me wrong: legacy in itself is not a problem. It's the combination of PHP being easy to pick up, lots of outsourcing, people writing procedural code without any notion of code readability, lack of tests, use of global state, etc that usually just make me cry and move on. For me the percentage of worthwhile PHP projects to chase is too low in comparison with many other technologies.
Even though PHP was what got me into programming in the first place, I nowadays thus chose to pick other battles. But every once in a while I still nostalgiously float back in time to my childhood days, enjoying every line of the almighty 4MB imagemagick monstrosity scripts I conspired. And then I'm happy that you nor I have to solve these enigma puzzles.
If you can do as little as possible in PHP and rely on the low level functions to stitch together what you need, deserialize and render data in the front end, use front-end templating, then PHP is insanely fast, practical language.
The issues with PHP are usually when people build out giant frameworks in PHP, rather than using PHP as a higher level glue language for the built-in fast C functions.