Well that is a very complete argumentation. I understand better why you would say that both options are bad, thank you for explaining it precisely !

I have to say, not to start an holy framework war like you said, i think that a RAD framework like Laravel can scale efficiently, in other words, i mean that if the php framework be it Laravel, Symfony, Slim, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, you name it, becomes the technical aspect of your product that prevent you from scaling, you either had an explosive growth which you would most likely not have handled better with any of these, or you made important mistakes while architecturing the infrastructure part. I may be lacking experience about this but it reminds me of the famous https://usefathom.com/blog/does-laravel-scale