PHP in a a nutshell.

Codeigniter = is it still alive?

symfony = nice but it is still bloated.

Laravel = absurdly bloated.

There are other more (Phalcom for example) but the top of the lsit are those 3. And they are horrible.

Most laravel developers are never looked at the code. I did and it is horrible. However, my main complain is the performace and I agree, the performance is painful bad in all of them. Why? Simple, they are bloated.

However, you can't compare laravel with a CMS. They are different things.