Most people are here to learn, to build something more advanced, and/or to build something prettier. No need to condescendingly pretend like everyone else should be judged by your needs and nostalgia in a chat room.
I wasn't. I was challenging the modern need to just bolt pre-existing frameworks together. I WAS hoping for a discussion about it. Maybe my intent was not clear. Apologies.
I'd welcome other opinions, but I find Laravel's support for 3rd party tools/frameworks to be genuinely superb. They save me time on ramp up and implementation, which is often the single biggest bottleneck for shipping side projects.
Pusher is one of many Pub/Sub mechanisms laravel supports [1], and Vuejs is included "out of the box".
Point is, these frameworks aren't exactly bolted together any more or less than any other software integration.
I'm not seeing a valid axiom to base that point on, either. I can use a framework and release an MVP in a month, or I can spend an entire year writing the equivalent of a framework and then release an MVP a month later (my custom framework lacking the battle tested stability, security, and peer review from a formal framework's community). Multiple frameworks exist to cater different projects and different opinionated teams. Laravel isn't even a fully reinvented wheel, it uses a lot of symphony components, it is compatible with a lot of generic PHP libraries, it uses some standard tooling like composer and webpack. By not writing my own custom framework, I can pass off my project to another team or my client can hire any random PHP developer.