Amine Matmati has written up a post with a few quick points refuting the "bloated framwork" myth as it relates to the Symfony framework.

At work, we’re trying to choose which PHP framework to use for our next project. As we’re breaking up our monolithic app into services, only micro frameworks were considered by the team. This choice was made to avoid the pain points we’ve encountered using our current full stack framework.

Not all full stack frameworks are created equal, however. Having worked with Symfony before, I proposed it as an option. As expected, I’ve had some pushback from my fellow coworkers. The main reason being that Symfony is bloated and overkill for our needs.

He then goes on to talk about how, despite many Symfony components being used individually by other projects, the overall framework still has the reputation for bloat. He goes through some of the main points usually mentioned by the opponents:

• Doctrine is complex/bad/slow
• Symfony is too verbose
• Symfony uses too much configuration

He does agree with some of the points made but usually not in the general way they've been stated. For example, while he does agree that Symfony is verbose he also points out that this verbosity provides more control to the developer as to exactly how things hook together.