I've been using PHP for many years now and I was very close to switch to NodeJS or Go a couple years ago until I discovered Laravel. That changed my view of PHP completely and it improved my code quality and potential by a 10x factor at least. I think that what Taylor Otwell has done in the last years with Laravel and with its ecosystem has been really underestimated. Not just for Laravel that is an excellent framework in my opinion, but especially with all the other products and libraries that he built along the way. It covers all the needs I had in building my last few SaaS products and it made my life soooo much easier.

A few examples:

Forge and Envoyer: setup and manage your VPS in a breeze and deploy your code with zero downtime.

Spark: create a SaaS product in literally a matter of minutes without having to care about all the boilerplates

Echo: real time notification across multiple channels (mail, Pusher, Slack, etc.)

Passport: OAuth2 API server as easy as it can be

Scout: Redis/Algolia search with just a couple of lines of code

Dusk: test your app easily both for unit and browser testing

Cashier: payments with Stripe and Braintree in a breeze (both for one time payment and recurring ones)

Socialite: OAuth for all kind of services (Facebook, Twitter, Google, ...)

And beside all this, there is the excellent Laracasts by Jeffrey Way that made me learn not just Laravel but PHP and JS in general in a really great way.

And I could go on talking with the great and simple queueing system, the perfect integration with VueJS that I love as well, ...

As you can see I'm a big big fan of Laravel in general and I hope that it will become popular in HN especially over time.