I've heard all over Reddit and Stack Overflow that using a PHP Framework should be avoided and that a developer would be better suited without a framework. My PHP experience at this point has been mainly with Laravel so I wanted to give this a shot.
I didn't want to blindly hack an app together, I wanted to follow a semblence of best / recommended practice, so I searched for just that. What I found was that these well received SO / Reddit "no framework" suggestions end up creating their own framework of sorts, using packages to handle HTTP Components, Routers, Error Handling, Templating etc.
While this was very interesting and I enjoyed my time spent researching PHP "sans" framework, I don't feel like this is an optimal way to create applications. That oppinion may show inexperience or ignorance, but I believe that a micro framework suchs as PHP Slim or similar would be better suited to a developers needs, if they wanted to avoid the bloat of a larger framework like Laravel, Symfony etc. and to gain a better understanding of what is going on under the hood of those frameworks.