PHP community had always been anti-frameworks and anti-libraries. I worked at company where use of third-party libraries was entirely forbidden on most projects. I think it's because:

- Quality of PHP frameworks is low (at least it was last time I used it) - PHP parses and evaluates whole libraries and framework code on each requests. There's proprietary commercial (lol!) software to enable at least caching of bytecode - Packaging just does not work (Pear, now there's Composer, not tried it, seems that it works)

Overall, last time I used PHP i had sense of its community mostly being nihilistic and preferring cowboy programming. It's straight opposite to Java where you will be shamed for not using dependency injection and EJBs for page visits counter. In PHP world you are considered insane misfit if you're writing tests.

For some things advice to just code and don't use unnecessary libs is useful. Recently I had that php/cgi feeling when I worked on small microservice in clojure: no OOP, no MVC, no ORM, no templates, no separating each 10 lines of code to module, just take Ring request and return Ring response which are simple associative arrays. This was a refreshing feeling.