At my place of work we use Laravel daily. Many of the developers who work there have limited knowledge about how PHP actually works and tend to have a better understanding of Laravel than what's actually going on.
They have trouble when it comes to resolving issues when Laravel does not having something to offer.
I think that it is important to know the base language when using a framework for something. That way you can understanding the processing and find solutions easily when the framework you're using doesn't have a solution built in.
How many of you guys are in the same boat? I've personally been writing raw PHP for at least 8 years.
I see it time and time again, where people who don't know enough of the underlying language to even be working with said language, but get SUCKERED into THINKING that the frameworks is saving them time, effort, or work JUST because the marketing and propaganda for said framework says so.
Whilst far, FAR worse on the client-side / front-end side of things -- where quite often the 'frameworks' are an outright middle finger to good practices and monuments to the stupidity of mankind -- this problem of people NOT knowing how to do things without the framework more often than not means they are also unqualified to even form an opinion of if it is in fact any easier! Often to the point that even though they have suckered themselves into thinking they know what they are doing, they quite clearly do not and are incapable of opening their yap on the bloody topic in a coherent fashion!
Where some people see abstraction, I see false simplicity. Where others see brevity, I see pointlessly and needlessly cryptic. Where yet even more see "easier", "simpler" or "making you more productive" I see harder, complex, and creating more work that takes more time!
The false simplicity aspect being the worst of it, as quite often they've tried to dumb it down so much it takes MORE work to get the job done, assuming you even can! It sure as hell ends up more work in the long run. As the saying goes, "one size fits all fits nobody".
But that's all part of the "credit mentality" -- pay more later for something you can't afford now. Far too many people dive for the framework crying "wah wah, eyes dunz wanna lurns!!!" not realizing it's as much effort to learn the framework as it is the damned language, and generally it's no more or less work (at least server side) either damned way!
... or worse, when it's MORE work using dipshit halfwitted idiotic mentally enfeebled front-end frameworks, pissing on accessibility, usability, sustainability, and every reason things like HTML even exist in the first damned place! Server-side frameworks like Laravel are less prone to this problem, but they still have the problem that a lot of folks seem to ONLY learn the framework, meaning they have little business opening their yap on if it is ACTUALLY easier or not -- AND end up unable to do anything the framework doesn't do for them.
Far, FAR too commonplace to have people with years invested in a framework who don't actually know a damned thing about the language and cannot do a blasted thing without the hand-holding or blindly copying other people's snippets.
In general, I don't suggest that people become language masters before starting with frameworks (this might be controversial).
But they should learn both the framework and the language (possibly simultaneously).
You can't really understand what's going on with the framework if you don't understand the language. That's only acceptable if you're a beginner and still actively working on learning it.
There are limits though. Some things are abstracted away well enough by good frameworks (although it always helps to know). You probably don't know how the framework does sockets for traditional pages, you might skip async if your framework doesn't use it, and you could delay learning SQL for some months with a good ORM. But you'll need to dig deeper to reach a higher level.
Ujjwal Kanth
Search @Unbxd
Sadly, the reality is, way too few people understand the core language and way too many butt their heads with the framework.
Learn the basics, no matter the language. It will always help you in long run.