It seems I’ve had completely different experiences than the author. Yes, Laravel is opinionated, but it’s certainly not “Laravel’s way or the highway”. I’ve built plenty of Laravel-based projects that weren’t straight-up MVC: I’ve built projects using approaches like ADR, as well as massive codebases using a DDD structure. I’ve worked on e-commerce platforms with complicated schemas and was able to use Eloquent just fine. Laravel does come with opinionated defaults out of the box, but if you know the framework then they absolutely are configurable to cope with your needs.

I also have two fairly busy SaaS apps built on Laravel. They both do alright and generate me some passive income on top of my day job at a multibillion dollar pharmaceutical company where—guest what?—we also use Laravel to power a pretty critical product within the company.

So in closing, this not-intended-to-be-a-hit-piece-but-definitely-is-a-hit-piece just reflects one person’s experience with the framework, but I’d argue the conclusions drawn don’t necessarily represent fact. It’s all about knowing your tools. If you dedicate a lot of time to something then yes, you’ll naturally become very adept with it. If you switch between stacks and frameworks then your knowledge isn’t going to be as deep and you’ll end up drawing conclusions and posting sweeping statements without having seen the full picture.