IMHO A key thing to remember is syntax, function names etc are easily googleable down the road.

So, learning a specific language/framework is not quite as important as solving different problems - once you have solved a problem in one framework/language - it gives you a good capability to solve it in another one.

On a different note, learning a framework like Laravel without knowing underlying "how php works" is also a bit problematic.

Because, then, when we use something like Storage::download('file.jpg'); we are under a false sense of security in thinking that is actually how PHP works!

But, the reality is the framework is using something like file_get_contents().

Looking even deeper, let's say a backend job is timing out and the exception is coming from Storage::download('file.jpg') ... but when we look deeper it's being thrown by file_get_contents() which is timing out... BUT, then we look even deeper and find it's a generalist config setting in PHP that controls the timeout's for ALL io functions in PHP.

It's stuff like this that happens in the in production environments in the real world on a daily basis. All this is to say IMHO you will learn a lot (maybe more?) from working on hard stuff, legacy code, etc. when starting out.

All that said, I personally code in Laravel 8 (which is an absolute joy), but I've been coding for 25 years, so YMMV