I can't think of anything that doesn't have a steep learning curve, aside from just not using any frameworks and writing PHP code. If you're building something solo and it's not too complicated, that's a decent option if you don't want to spend time learning things that won't get you to hello world. But, depending on what you're doing, something like WordPress might do what you want out of the box.
FWIW and IMO Java and .Net has gone in the opposite direction of many others and I find myself reaching for them now (I used to prefer PHP, later PHP/Symfony, smaller PHP frameworks and then Python with Flask but the last 5 years Java and .Net has become so simple and fast (in dev, prod has been fast for a long time) that I see no reason to go with anything else.
