Why is Laravel much popular in USA than Symfony ?

If you like OOP, encapsulation, clean and well structured code, testability then yes, Symfony is the better solution because Laravel violates all of this principles.

It propagates a false simplicity. It bypasses object orientation massively with its facades , its ORM and its magic nonsense.

The ORM (Eloquent) barely deserves the name as it delivers Model classes which are not much more than associative arrays. Since the ORM does not know your columns it's not capable to tell if one exists or not - it will just fail on save. Apart from column access there is more magical stuff happening with mutators. This whole lib is one of the biggest pile of junk I've seen in a long time, and it implements the Active-Record antipattern. Nuff said I guess.

Blade is not bad but pointless. It can't do anything, twig can't do just as good or better. Also it's not running in a sandbox and allows everyone heavy php code usage in the templates which can lead to a huge mess when inexperienced developers are involved in the project.

IoC / Dependency injection is good, and was actually better than Symfony's approach for a long time because of the powerful auto wiring. You can inject anything into anything without messing with config files or declare services. Symfony is closing the gap now but still Laravel has an edge here.

Vue.js integration / Laravel-mix is great. I'm using it in Symfony where it integrates just as well.

Where I lived, Symfony was de facto among PHP frameworks at startups. Laravel took over when the local coding bootcamp and some new startups used Laravel.

Laravel appears to be easier to get started with and learn (mind, I used to like CakePHP a lot when I was heavily using PHP, so at the very least, I used to survey frameworks), and the community of Laravel makes a big difference.

One of the enterprise cos here also uses Vue, so that would be an enterprise-level interest in using Laravel over Symfony.

That said, I never used Laravel at all, and I've built products in production using Symfony. By the time Laravel was en vogue where I live, I was forced to use .NET professionally, and I was trying to insert Python where I could. A few opportunities came my way for Laravel, but despite the reasons above for choosing the framework, the startups here hiring Laravel devs seem to forget about that.

I've used both and I largely prefer Laravel. There are a few main reasons for that:

1. Laravel is MUCH easier to bootstrap. There are no xml files, no dependency injection crap.
2. Laravel is easier to learn. You can pretty much bypass the MVC pattern if you want to and dig as deep as you need to.
3. Tons of magic. Because of Laravel's heavy use of facades and static methods, it requires less amount of boilerplate
4. Community is amazing and constantly evolving
5. There are lots of integrations and full-stack solutions. Laravel integrates really well with Vue, giving a PHP developer an "in" into JS.

There are more reasons but those are my main ones. I like Symfony as well and I think it's great for large enterprise applications. I've use Symfony in that context and it works well; however, trying to wire in a new bundle or library takes effort to learn the xml and bootstrapping system while with Laravel, I've noticed I didn't have to really do that.

And by what criterias you're making your assumption about what's better or not? I guess most people don't find "better" things of Symfony that better than Laravel's "better" things so this is the reason why Symfony is not used as much as Laravel.

Mostly because it is easier to use, faster to start, it has a nice documentation and still can evolve well into a big application.

Maybe are Juniors programmers, may be Laravel have good face and marketing, but in fact Laravel had been built over components of Symfony.