[stanmancan]

I used it for 5ish years and never felt like I really understood the framework; there way too much magic going on.

What forced the switch was using Livewire; cool idea but horrible performance, poor documentation, no support, and constant rewrites. Knowing it was based off of Live View I looked into that and there was no going back.

[TheCapeGreek]

Livewire was rewritten once for V2 -> V3 iirc?

I'm glad you found something that works better for you, but I wouldn't say that not learning to use the framework (which you don't need to understand the internals for to use) automatically makes the other option better. It just means Elixir clicked for you better.

[stanmancan]

Laravel really forces you to do things the "Laravel way" and as soon as you try to step outside that box you run into tons of headaches along the way, and upgrades become painful. I haven't found that to be the case with Phoenix at all.

There's also lots of "magic" going in in Laravel behind the scenes and it can be pretty painful to try and figure out exactly why something happened.

Livewire was a mess over all. It had a lot of breaking changes along the way and performance was terrible for anything but the most basic tasks. The support was poor; the docs were alright at best, the screencasts were paid, and Caleb never showed his face in his own Discord, which was troublesome because there weren't enough people using it for the community to support each other. The weird bugs and behaviour were all over the place and the errors you received when you ran into one of them did nothing to help you track it down.

I guess to sum up my feelings: PHP was fine but Elixir did click better. Laravel is a black box and Phoenix is objectively a better framework.