You overestimate the importance of frameworks.
Yes, there are trillions of frameworks, often doing more or less the same thing. My typical solution is to ignore them, until I have a big incentive to learn one of them, or until I notice that one of them is praised repeatedly by many people for a long time.
But the essence of programming is somewhere else.
It is not about learning JQuery or some other library. It is about having skills that would allow you to design a new cool library, or even a new programming language. I am not saying that you should be doing any of this; just that when you become good, you will have the ability to do it. Then when you look at a new library, or even a new programming language, it will only take an hour or two of exploration, and you will say: "Yeah, I understand the problem the author was trying to solve, I see why he chose this solution, and it will obviously have these advantages and disadvantages." It could take 10 years of learning to get there, assuming you focus on learning the important things.
How to learn programming?
Why is it a bad choice? First, you have to learn many things at the same time. Learning is easy if you divide the knowledge into small pieces, learn them gradually, practice each of them separately, then put it together. But with web development you try to learn databases, markup language, and two programming languages at the same time. (And then there are dozen frameworks out there.) It's like trying to swallow the whole elephant, instead of just having a steak. Second, PHP is a horribly designed programming language; worst of those which are used frequently.
My advice: Forget PHP completely and get some decent computer science education. Find out what universities teach, and then find some free videos on the internet. Become comfortable using pseudocode; it helps you to forget the details and focus on the essence. You can translate the pseudocode to any specific programming language later. (Knowing how to translate the pseudocode to a given language = understanding the language. Writing elegant pseudocode = understanding programming.)
A more down-to-earth advice would be to learn Python. At a Udacity online course. Give it two weekends, forget all you know and just follow the lessons, and then see the difference. (Part of the difference is Python versus PHP, but a greater part is having things explained properly, as opposed to reading an average online tutorial.)