Maybe an off-topic rant but I ran into a similar feeling when wanting to do a personal PHP project with Laravel.

Even with the backend set, the front still felt like it had to make a choice among Blade, Livewire, Vue and React glued together with Inertia (?). Then you had to pick between several different authentication systems. Unfortunately I wanted app support as well which would require React Native, Flutter or something else which the Laravel documentation doesn't seem to make any mention about.

Naturally one could make it all from scratch with vanilla PHP and JS but that's often not a suitable comparison to a full-fledge framework.