The codebases that you can create nowadays are light years away from what you would see 10 years ago. And the frameworks have improved alongside too.
Maybe read https://stitcher.io posts about the new features since 8.0 to have a grasp of the language changes.
Edit: I'm talking about the php code being compiled / run by an external process which makes the whole thing staless.
It was a "working" design when people were dropping .php files in ftp folder on some hosting provider.
There's resources like laracasts which take you through from the basics to highly complex concepts without it feeling like you're being lectured.
One benefit of Laravel is that under the hood it shares a lot of Symfonys core components so should you decide to switch at some point it's not too much of a learning curve.
What "external" process are you talking about?
I've used it to build ~5 websites and it's been very solid. The docs are pretty good and it does most of what you need out of the box. Especially the 8+ versions of Laravel. If there's something you need that's not included in the framework itself, it's likely there's a well-maintained community package.
Just my 2c.
This model is imo outdated, why can't we create a PHP server that just runs without the need of something external.
PHP-FPM is the server you're talking about. It's a supervisor process that forks into N child processes, each handling incoming request. Supervisor deals with child exits and respawns, keeping the whole thing alive and robust.
This model is what PM2 does for node.js to keep it alive when it crashes.
There's also PHP command line interface that lets you run a server by starting a PHP script, in which you get to access OS's event loop and various other lower level interfaces.
You don't seem to be knowledgeable about the topic and you're assuming something entirely wrong. Why didn't you google before this discussion?
One can start a synchronous, process-based server or event-loop async one. What exactly is outdated here and how does ANY other language do it differently?
All servers, of any kind, work the same way. Whether you want to accept it or not is not up to me, but fact remains.
PHP does not work in any different way, but it seems there's this huge barrier where you want to believe you're right. I can't dispel that so I bid you farewell.
For getting up and running, it saves time. For large projects, it adds leaky abstractions, overhead for each request, a need to upgrade another layer - with poor upgrade compatibility (in our anecdotal case), and very little gain. And it has it's own learning curve, which with modern PHP may be redundant.
Symfony looks better in that it is more of a library and less of a framework, though of course that has its own tradeoffs.
IMO, the weakest part of PHP is the db functions (both PDO and mysqli/postgres)