That’s a perfectly valid argument. I’m not saying people shouldn’t make that argument. I’m just saying I don’t want to hear about mysql_real_escape_string.

To answer your question, I don’t know that modern PHP has big advantages over other modern languages. I’m not knocking on doors to spread the gospel of Symfony. But there’s no need to switch away from it either. And hosting is still easy and cheap. Prototyping your product as a Laravel or Symfony app is a reasonable choice.