While getting quotes for a site recently the question of filesystem came up a lot and I admittedly didn't know much on the subject.

Doing some research the popular choices appear to be either PHP frameworks or less often ASP.NET frameworks.

Among popular PHP frameworks I see Laravel come up a lot, open source is certainly more reliable than something maintained by Google, Facebook, or Amazon but currently the Laravel maintainers are pushing AI really really hard.

So is the only real solution to learn to program with PHP without using any frameworks or libraries? Can anybody who has implemented a secure fileserver for a website tell me how difficult or easy it would be to learn?