And nobody complains because they are completely optional and Taylor Otwell's team puts so much effort into the framework.
But if you've used Laravel, you know it's pleasant to write apps with it.
And the team also dogfoods heavily.
Laravel has excellent DX because the people building it use it to build those products.
1. No widespread practice of environment provisioning automation. Today Docker and k8s are ubiquitous. Having a list of requirements your application needs well kept were hard to find - which Heroku needs. 2. In the same sense as above, automated deployment was not a common thing. 3. Barriers to cloud adoption. Development tools were not widespread. Paying for software development and deployment is common now, it wasn't.