Laravel follows dubious practices: god objects (like a parent class which has hundreds of functions), static functions etc. The kind of practices our product is actively moving away from (originally based on Symfony 1 which had all the architectural issues Laravel has now), because it didn't scale beyond CRUD (makes it easy to write hard to support spaghetti code etc.). So it feels like a step backward... Especially when you learn they base it on top of Symfony which is already great and nicely designed.