Started with Laravel 4. Back then it was a lightweight framework — routes, Eloquent, Blade, done. Now the box ships with queues, broadcasting, events, policies, gates, notifications, API resources, Sanctum, Pennant, Folio, Volt, Prompts, Reverb, Pulse… The list grows every year.
For someone picking it up today, this isn’t a framework anymore — it’s an entire ecosystem where figuring out where to start is a project in itself. The docs are great, genuinely. But there’s so much of them now that just reading through everything takes a week.
On the flip side, when you need to ship a real product in a month — everything’s right there. No agonizing over which of 15 queue packages to use or hunting for a decent WebSocket server. Install Reverb, move on.
Feels like Laravel is heading toward becoming Rails for PHP — a platform that covers absolutely everything. The question is whether they can keep the onboarding simple. So far they’re pulling it off, but every release raises the bar just a little.
When I was doing this project, and I was doing a presentation for the client, the client looked at me like WTF is this mess. And it was. I scratched it, restarted, kept it tighter, it was more tedious, but finally we are in beta testing. I did not appreciate this experience, and afterwards, I looked at everything and decided I was done with PHP.