[_peeley]

I use Laravel both at my day job and for a few side projects, and it's a real blast to work with. It's very similar to Rails in that you can auto-generate most boilerplate for models/views/controllers, and then paint-by-numbers from there. The HTML templating is nice enough for static sites, but it has great Vue integration if you're making something a little more interactive. If you also ever need to venture outside the super feature-packed framework, the PHP ecosystem is absolutely enormous so it's rare you'll ever be wanting for packages.

The PHP language obviously still has some sharp edges and annoying design choices, but it's seen some huge improvements in the past few years imo. Simply using a framework like Laravel will also save you from some of the more infamous footguns, since there's a lot of secure/sane defaults included.