To the author's credit, I have experienced this boogeyman during my time in the PHP world. There have been a couple of times on SO or reddit where my questions

To the author's credit, I have experienced this boogeyman during my time in the PHP world. There have been a couple of times on SO or reddit where my questions were met with a "why don't you just use Laravel?" My most memorable experience was during the interview process for a company that used PHP for their backend. I attempted to solve the take-home assignment using a couple of libraries (some Symfony components). An overarching criticism of my work was "you should have used a framework" and "always use pre-existing packages rather than write your own." The reasoning was that popular packages are vetted and tested by the PHP community. I understand why they believe this. I also find it astounding that PHP developers distrust vanilla PHP so much (and likely for good reason).