There's nothing inherently wrong with using a full-featured framework like Laravel or Rails. It saves time, and backend performance is not always a dealbreaker

There's nothing inherently wrong with using a full-featured framework like Laravel or Rails. It saves time, and backend performance is not always a dealbreaker (small projects, caching, etc). Besides, is there a good PHP micro-framework comparable to say Flask? I've tried a couple and it was not worth my time. Flask is useful because it's well architected for its purpose, has a big helpful community, lots of extensions, extensive documentation, etc. Like someone else said here, Flask with SQLAlchemy and a few Flask-* extensions will give any full featured framework a run for its money, not so with any PHP microframework that I know of.