[ahofmann]

I tried CakePHP at the time and it was awful, like many other PHP frameworks of the time (remember joomla?). Frameworks were either "what the framework provides is easy, but don't dare to do anything that the framework is not made for" or "just do what you want, we provide almost no help, just figure it out by yourself". And all of them were slooooooow. It wasn't possible to answer a web request in under 50 milliseconds with any PHP framework in 2008.

Laravel was awful when everyone else were awful. But around Laravel 5.5 (and PHP 7) it was complete enough, documented enough and fast enough, that you could just start building stuff with it without having to think about it. Is Laravel the best Framework out there? Not at all! But is also not considered harmful, far from it.