You make a fair point. I've seen this happen before and after a while, projects that have essentially turned into a poor framework, plus the application, can become somewhat of a pain to maintain.

PHP has come a long way in the past few years and the amount of open source packages has become huge, especially since the adoption of composer. I think with that in mind, it is now easier to build and maintain PHP applications without a framework as such, but just with the components you specifically need. Like yourself, I haven't actively been working with PHP for a while either. But it's been interesting to watch what's been happening with it and it's community.