>Probably my biggest issue with CakePHP (what I use) is that when you step outside the standard use cases you fall down a rabbit hole of complexity and peculiar idioms. The result here is that one becomes a "Cake developer" rather than a "PHP developer"; there is a high degree of lock-in and switching the entire toolset becomes difficult and impractical.

Totally agree. But that's because of poor design in CakePHP (I used it too).

>What I see in this post that I agree with is the idea that PHP tools should be more modular and decoupled, so you can grab a full stack bundle if you want, but can use modules piecemeal if you don't. Currently, the latter option is lacking in PHP.

Actually, it's not. Take a look at Zend Framework and you'll see that you have a TON of modules for doing all kind of stuff and if you want you could use just the core ones and ignore the rest. It works so well that I even use components in non-Zend Framework projects.