Seems like a similar concept to Livewire: https://laravel-livewire.com/

Spring was first MVC framework, but Laravel in PHP and Django in Python were inspired by Ruby on Rails.

Django wasn’t inspired by Ruby on Rails. They are roughly the same age, but Django was made public a little later than Rails was.

For first MVC, you didn't mean Struts rather than Spring? Even then I have a vague feeling there were earlier ones.

Laravel was inspired by ASP MVC, which itself took inspiration from Spring, not Ruby on Rails.

> My only real gripe with PHP is the annotation syntax. Yikes. Stuff that's in comments SHOULD NOT AFFECT RUNNING CODE. Who came up with that?

That will change in PHP 8 with the introduction of attributes (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/attributes_v2).