Indeed. Try making something with Symfony and you're going to have to adhere to strict theoretical guidelines that encourages you to write 200 10-line files, for a simple application. Use Drupal and well, you're going to spend ten years just to understand how it all works on that pathetic joke, use laravel and as opinionated as it is, it's probably going to make a lot more sense to you in ten months time.

Unless, you want to do something in the database other than basic CRUD. That's when ugly hacks are needed.