checked for a fresh laravel install: 110 packages, 40 of those are development dependencies. Of the 70, only 38 are non (symfony/laravel) dependencies.
The PHP ecosystem tends to use packages-for-interfaces, so that ups the count somewhat.
Yes, I saw similar numbers (just not in empty projects, but I'm not familiar with Laravel/Lumen - there might have been a good reason for it).
The point is that Composer packages are far from being that granular, we have less dependencies by literally order of magnitude.
I think a better measure really is lines of code. A comparison with react is _very unfair to laravel/rails_, with laravel being a full-featured framework, and yet react is still much worse:
laravel/framework:
no-dev-deps: 307,405 lines of PHP (36MB)
all-deps: 535,383 lines of PHP (58MB)
all-deps: 1,570,720 lines of Javascript + 96417 lines of typescript (348MB)
(no-dev-deps): 264123 lines of Ruby + 23614 lines of C + 17009 lines of JS (55MB)
(all-deps): 332083 lines of Ruby + 23614 lines of C + 18055 lines of JS (54MB)
[1]: create-react-app doesn't split out dev/prod dependencies https://stackoverflow.com/a/44872787/368328
I think it was Laravel or Lumen? I tried that one once and was kinda amazed it pulled like 100 packages. In PHP ecosystem, I think that's considered a lot (to be fair, this is few years back). I've worked on fairly large projects (mostly Symfony + Doctrine and PHPUnit) and don't recall seeing so many dependencies.
Now compare this to initialization of any common JS framework starter.