I can't say, as a PHP dev, I'm more productive in Laravel. It's easy until you really need to know how things work. I know plenty of people are productive in it, but I think a light framework with an ORM is so much more palatable. Though I haven't completely given up on Laravel
There's such a high churn to the ecosystem and the way things are wired together, I feel like a beginner every time I use it. Volt is really bad. I need to be clear, it's really bad and adds nothing. We had a separation of concerns, then we had backend logic in Livewire components with Alpine JS, and now everything is in the view again, only with a Frankenstein of all three options. At best, its introduction is change for the sake of change, and at worst, they are trying to make deployment "complicated" to drive adoption to their paid offerings, which are marketed for managing this complexity.
It's easy to have bugs, in general, that are hard to catch due to way things are wired. I think Filament is good tech, but I had a lot of issues using Filament on Laravel 12 with Volt. There was a big impedance mismatch and figuring out why my layout was suddenly broken when navigating to the admin page, in a brand new app, was not fun. That should not be the experience. It should be obvious how things are wired together.
And while I'm definitely not a Laravel ecosystem expert, when I have an issue, I have had to explain how Laravel works to others who bill themselves as experts. I don't think it's because they're fake experts, I think it's because Laravel is so hard to "know." There's so much opaqueness with the OOP magic strings and dynamic calls that people have had to make assumptions on how the code is run. And you can maybe get far doing that. But if you're unlucky enough to run into an issue, you're at the mercy of some poorly laid out (but verbose) docs to find out why a certain bug is happening.
Agreed that Volt/Mix is bad, but I haven't touched it since setting it up the first time. It doesn't bother me day-to-day.
I try to avoid hacking the framework or needing to know it's magic. The point of an opinionated framework is to just do things their way. This works for me 95% of the time. The few times I need to do something non-standard, I don't mind spending time hacking.
It sounds like you're building a lot of new projects in Laravel rather than maintaining a single one over the years.
For these same reason I hand coded a router with Psr4 autoloader which does work for my projects. Most clients I work for never ask for Laravel or anything specific, they just want the business logic working.
There's such a high churn to the ecosystem and the way things are wired together, I feel like a beginner every time I use it. Volt is really bad. I need to be clear, it's really bad and adds nothing. We had a separation of concerns, then we had backend logic in Livewire components with Alpine JS, and now everything is in the view again, only with a Frankenstein of all three options. At best, its introduction is change for the sake of change, and at worst, they are trying to make deployment "complicated" to drive adoption to their paid offerings, which are marketed for managing this complexity.
It's easy to have bugs, in general, that are hard to catch due to way things are wired. I think Filament is good tech, but I had a lot of issues using Filament on Laravel 12 with Volt. There was a big impedance mismatch and figuring out why my layout was suddenly broken when navigating to the admin page, in a brand new app, was not fun. That should not be the experience. It should be obvious how things are wired together.
And while I'm definitely not a Laravel ecosystem expert, when I have an issue, I have had to explain how Laravel works to others who bill themselves as experts. I don't think it's because they're fake experts, I think it's because Laravel is so hard to "know." There's so much opaqueness with the OOP magic strings and dynamic calls that people have had to make assumptions on how the code is run. And you can maybe get far doing that. But if you're unlucky enough to run into an issue, you're at the mercy of some poorly laid out (but verbose) docs to find out why a certain bug is happening.