The comments on this thread are interesting. I use Laravel extensively. For big applications, serving lots of users. It works when the application is relatively complex, and the ecosystem is second to none. Need to just throw it up on a server? There's Forge[1]. A better CI/CD process? Envoyer[2]. Want serverless? Not for me, but Fathom[3] use it to deal with >100Ms of hits a day; there's Vapor[4]. All three of those are Laravel developed and maintained solutions.

If I'm throwing something small together then sure, I'll maybe use Flask or something lightweight[5]. But Laravel is very good for nearly every use-case where you intend to actually build something.

Then there's the bigger question: if you're building to meet a business use case, or well, to make money, then why wouldn't you use the most complete scaffold possible? I'd say Laravel is that. If it's too much of a pain to do something in PHP I can just stick in a call to a python file or really whatever language I want. But for the basics? A db? Auth? and lots of other stuff that I never want to personally build again? Yeah, give me Laravel everyday.

[1] https://forge.laravel.com/ [2] https://envoyer.io/ [3] https://usefathom.com/ [4] https://vapor.laravel.com/ [5] To prove I'm not a shill, this is from literally last night: https://github.com/simonminton/consensus-article