> Symfony is a great piece of software. So is Laravel.

And to be clear, Laravel is a piece of Symfony software, and a good example of what you can do with Symfony packages and a bit of opinion.

There are 13 Symfony dependencies in https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/9.x/composer.json alone, and many of the Laravel packages listed in there also depend on them; the Laravel Request class extends Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request, the Response class extends Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response, etc.