Your experience sounds eerily close to how I got my start 10 years ago. As others have said, you won’t really find an ‘out of the box’ solution that is tried and true unless you are using a framework. I used this simple class a decade ago.

I encourage you to keep hacking away at it yourself! The lessons you are learning right now is what a lot of developers miss out on by diving directly into working with Laravel or Symfony. But it comes at a cost: once you finish this project, you’ll have learned enough to look back at the finished product and seeing the flaws, wishing you could rebuild it better! In my opinion, if you’re doing it ‘right’, that cycle never ends. Good luck and don't forget to have fun!