Hearing these negative laravel opinions is super interesting. As someone who absolutely dreads working with php, I’ve always been curious about laravel cause people seem to love it so much.
As someone who has worked in a lot of languages and a lot of frameworks, I never understood the hype around Laravel. It's very opinionated as to how you structure your application but it gives you very little for forcing all that structure. I thought it would be and should be more batteries included. And the active-record style ORM is also not my cup of tea.
Nothing to fear about it. It's just a scripting language. It has some bad history but not so much because of the language but how it was used. The same messes could have been (and were) created with VBscript (ASP) and Perl back in the day.
All I can figure is that a lot of people, especially those willing to put up with PHP's warts in the first place, look at a giant crusty knot and can only be impressed with its size and seek to emulate its design. If, upon seeing the huge crusty knot, you puke in your mouth a little and say "are you sure you needed a knot at all" they briefly look at you funny before carrying on to make bigger and bigger knot composition frameworks to blather about on their blogs where they have a picture of their head in a little circle, because that was trendy among the so-called artisans for a time.