Just out of curiosity, when was the last time you worked with Symfony?

The framework has changed massively after the earliest versions (1~3). These days it's very similar to Java's SpringBoot. After scaffolding all you get is a thin layer with the HTTP abstraction, configuration support, reflection-based Dependency Injection and a testing framework (PHPUnit).

Since the framework is component-based you pull dependencies as you need them. I find the documentation really good and honestly I don't see much magic in it, it's an event-based web framework. Laravel and it's facades on the other hand is very magical.