I would say no. PHP currently has a speed advantage, and it may be easier to scale, and the Psy shell is a very comfortable REPL. However, PHP as a language is somewhat restricted in meta-expression, and the syntax is clunky by comparison. Laravel borrowed a lot of Ruby's Enumerable library, but there are still things that you will miss. Symfony and the Active* ecosystems are probably comparable? I feel like when I'm following the execution of something in Rails, I end up reading a lot of two-line methods whose purpose is not at all apparent from context, and in Laravel, I miss the ability to do absolutely anything in a single line of code. Both languages have pretty comparable web libraries. The Laravel ecosystem is newer, it's slightly less likely that a given package will exist, and it may be buggy. The Rails ecosystem is more mature, it's slightly less likely that a given package will be maintained, and it may be buggy. PHP is almost exclusively targeted at the web, and Ruby is slightly more general-purpose.
If Ruby/Rails is an option, you're sort of baking into the comparison the idea that being expressive at the cost of performance is an adequate tradeoff. Ruby is going to win over PHP on that metric every time. In general, trading performance for expresssivity tends to be good; Rails has succeeded in spite of its performance, not because of it.
In what way? What is your metric? Laravel is slower, has less support in the community and uses PHP.. It also lacks webpack and SPA capabilities which are already baked into Rails. So in my opinion Laravel is actually behind.
Just did some quick Googling and looks like there is a Laravel port of Turbolinks. It certainly does look like they’re catching up. Surpassed? Not convinced.
"catching up" = copying most of what Rails is doing, not innovating or having any original ideas of their own. That's not really a sign of a strong community, and people working in Laravel might start asking themselves why not work with the real thing instead of a clone.
The Laravel community and projects/products that are part of it are very attractive from a small business POV, everything seems to work well together, knowledge is transferable.
You have Laravel for web apps, the Statamic CMS for blogs and content heavy sites, Jigsaw for landing pages, Maizzle as email framework, all using tech and conventions that Laravel devs know. On the frontend they promote Vue and Tailwind CSS across the board.
They actually make it possible for smaller shops or freelancers to have everything under their control. It's basically like a polished Wordpress ecosystem.
It’s a great approach for hybrid web apps. I didn’t want to go with a React only frontend where routing is controlled by react-router. I’ve opted instead to leave the routing to Turbolinks. This has a number of advantages. I get the benefits of an SPA while still being able to render server generated Rails views. This frees me up to use React only where it’s advantageous; like on real-time super dynamic views. I have multiple React entry points and the data is tied together by a shared Redux store. I’ll admit this was not trivial to setup but it’s been working great.
AFAIK anyway, Webpack isn't automatically installed with every Rails app but is easily available via https://github.com/rails/webpacker. So it's not "bundled" necessarily all the time, but is quite trivially added to a Rails project.
If your question is more like "why the hell would you ever want to run Webpack and Rails simultaneously together":
You will increasingly find tools you want to use that more-or-less require Webpack (or a similar JS build tool). Because of things like e.g. the asset pipeline, it's extremely frustrating trying to get those tools to work in concert with each other as micro-services that know nothing about each other. It's much easier to use something like Webpacker so they can play nicely with each other.
I get the idea, it just seems like a very "2013" way of doing web development. Things have moved on past the monolith for an endless amount of reasons.
I used to believe the same as you and wrote quite a few web apps with dedicated backends and frontends. The overhead and amount of redundancy doesn’t seem worth it to me anymore though and I’ve turned to hybrid apps. Development time has dramatically improved and I’ve lost literally nothing.
Rails can be used without the asset pipeline and with Webpacker only. But yes, most likely you will not use API-only mode of using the asset pipeline or webpacker.
