Taylor Otwell: What 14 Years of Laravel Taught Me About Maintainability

Laravel is designed from the ground up to be used by junior developers who don't care about pesky things like maintainability and scalability and just want to put out the minimum viable product as fast as possible, and with the least amount of work possible. It's full of "magic" abstractions built with the primary purpose of making the code look pretty at a glance to the inexperienced, completely disregarding good programming practices and even essential language features in the process, the programming equivalent of lipstick on a pig. It markets itself to beginners as "the magic framework that does everything for you" and is as big as it is today purely due to successfully capturing a large percentage of that audience.

Symfony goes in the complete opposite direction: it's designed to be used by experienced developers to build maintainable, extensible applications while employing good programming practices. It encourages you to "look under the hood" and understand how things work instead of just telling you "to do X, write Y" without elaborating. It has many convenience features but they're generally built on top of language features with good practices in mind instead of handwaving it all away. It's very modular and allows you to extend and/or replace almost every part of the framework with your own custom version if the included version isn't suitable for your use case. And so on.

One of the best examples of Symfony vs Laravel is the way database tables are mapped to PHP code. In Symfony, SQL tables are just PHP classes. To create a new table, you create a new class, add the columns you want as properties, add some attributes to tell the ORM how to map all of that to a table, and it's done. Your database columns match your class properties, every time you query the database you get instances of that class and can use them as a proper objects with properly typed fields.

Laravel, meanwhile, does none of that, your database tables are defined purely by the database itself at runtime, what they call "Models" are just empty classes that have the database columns injected into them at runtime as dynamic properties. You cannot know what properties your Model has just by looking at it, I believe you need a Laravel-specific IDE plugin just to autocomplete them. You're essentially working with glorified associative arrays the whole time. This alone is a massive red flag that should make any experienced programmer avoid Laravel.

Wordpress sits on its own little island as a big pile of legacy code that's almost frozen in time, full of bad practices that no self-respecting developer wants to touch. No lipstick on this pig, it's as ugly as it is obtuse. It's still commonly used today because someone with zero programming knowledge can load up a bunch of plugins full of security holes and make a somewhat usable site that vaguely matches their vision, but using it for any new project more complex than a basic blog is generally seen as a mistake.

Can't speak for Drupal as I have no experience with it.