It happened! Yii3 is officially released after years of intensive development and polishing.
Yii was always following the same principles of being performant, flexible but with good defaults, practice-oriented, simple, explicit, and consistent. Yii3 is not an exception.
While Yii 1.1 and Yii 2.0 are good frameworks, Yii3 was born to improve things even more, addressing the following drawbacks:
Yii 2.0 had a closed ecosystem with difficulties configuring general PHP packages.
Some magic and implicitness. Non-standard PHP behavior for objects introduced in Yii 2.0.
PHP standards compatibility and modern PHP usage were not in place due to backwards compatibility constraints.
Some anti-patterns, such as the service locator being available out of the box. That was affecting overall projects' testability and maintainability in the long run.