To get to know Laravel, I forced myself to build a project with it for a few weeks and I did not like it.

I found myself getting sucked in into a complex project structure and dealing with all kinds of strangeness like "artisan commands", "the autoload cache" etc.

With Django, I can build a web application in a single file that has "import django" on top and take it from there:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40788329

You can do that with Symfony.

https://symfony.com/doc/current/configuration/micro_kernel_t...

https://symfony.com/blog/new-in-symfony-7-2-simpler-single-f...

Laravel is excellent for building a website, for smaller projects there are simpler tools and frameworks

I had hoped to forget

You don't like magic? /s

I much prefer Symfony, but that's mainly because it's the framework I started with.

I was forced to move from Symfony to Laravel and I really dislike it. This experience seems to be very common.

It’s difficult for me to trust a framework backed by venture capital (https://blog.laravel.com/accel-invests-57m-into-laravel). There are too many incentives to prioritize making money, which makes it easy to overlook developer experience. I rather use Symfony instead.

Symfony took venture capital years ago, it's no different really: https://www.sourceguardian.com/blog-symfony-gets-boost-from-...