I’m the same way, even for little side projects at work. Basic old-school PHP is effortless to setup and maintain on a server. It just works. This means my little side project can remain a little side project, instead of become a burden with a bunch of unnecessary complexity that modern frameworks introduce.
Anytime a hello-work tutorial starts with running a command that generates 50 boilerplate folders/files, I die a little inside.
What's your web server? To connect PHP with nginx you need a bunch of arcane configuration.