Because your project is useless when a dependency is removed in the future.
It happened to me one time and now I'm really considering to include the vendor folder in my own repository.
Of course a dependency manager is still very useful to setup a new project.
Wouldn't a minimalist implementation just look up shortened URLs in a map and spit out a redirect to the original URL? Seems like that could be done in a few KiB.
TBH, You can pretty much do a single PHP file, with no dependencies, and without mod_rewrite. Just site.com/?fDS- for example, and it redirects. Storage can be MySQL or some other DB or even a flat file with locking.
Congratulations on the release but I can just discourage people to use URL shorteners. They obfuscate key information, are potentially a security risk as a result, require extra http requests and what happens in the future when you turn the service off? A trend I've never fancied.
The structure is good. You can read what's happening clearly. It also shows what's a laravel idiom and what is modern php. I giggled a bit when reading the user factory code. It feels so enterprise. Not a bad thing in itself. I was just happy to see php code that is not a ball of mud held together by holy water. :)
I don't know. If something is defined as "lightweight" (their word, but same point applies to "minimalist"), I should not have to blow my entire brain memory stack keeping the filesystem structure in my head just to start to examine how it's done.
Good on you for making it, but I have to side with the comments here that it's not only not lightweight, I personally also can't see what's so modern about it - I'm not hating on PHP but even as a language that's an old beast.
Two random'ish selections...
https://gist.github.com/MendelGusmao/2356310
https://github.com/sanshi0518/shorturl-nginx