In this new post to his site Paul Jones talks a bit more about coupling in frameworks (see some of his recent Aura posts for more), this time looking at how the Symfony framework defines "decoupled" based on its object structure.

Previously, on decoupling and dependencies, I said: "Some [Symfony] commenters were dissatsifed with my use of unit testing requirements to discover what a package really depends on, as opposed to what its composer.json file states." I'm willing to allow that the Symfony commenters here might be right. Let's try looking at Symfony's claims and see how they stack up.

Based on a list of components Symfony says don't have mandatory dependencies, he finds that - out of the fifteen given - four of them do have dependencies.

Does having mandatory dependencies make it a bad project? Not at all. It just means their statement of "no mandatory dependencies" (and related statements) is not true for all the components listed. Now, it may be that the Symfony folk have a different idea of what "decoupled" and "standalone" mean.