Honestly, it all depends on the project ... I am currently working on the backend and api, and here we decided only hardcore. Although, for some projects it is wiser to use the framework.
Anyway, if you want to develop, I would advise you to develop with symfony ... The same Laravel is based on symfony. Drupal, phbb, as well as other things are translated into symfony as well translated into symfony. Focusing on https://packagist.org : Symfony is the objective leader chosen by the world community, Laravel is the second, and Yii & Yii2 is very far from them. It says a lot.
If you want to get a real qualification and the opportunity to work with any markets (that is, not to focus only on Russia), I would advise working with Symfony or Laravel. Of course, if you become an advanced progroger on Yii2, you can find your audience of customers, but you will be unpleasantly surprised that Yii2 is not at all demanded (compared to S & L) in the international market. The most interesting thing is that the Russian market is currently catching up (well, here as it can) west and saturated with Symfony and Laravel.
Those. when choosing a framework, you need to rely on a lot of indicators ... here is about the same as if you wrote websites yourself as best you could, but then you saw Joomla and decided to become a super-pro in it, worked with it for 5 years ... and then We watched others get serious, interesting and well-paid projects after 1-2 years of serious work with any framework.