[TOGoS]

Granted, this was on some virtual machine on a computer from 2007. But I did pare it down and down until all that was left was Laravel itself, doing "nothing".

I don't find it all that surprising. Overly-complex startup times are the convention for web frameworks that want to be taken seriously [by koolaid-driven managers]. These days I'm forced to work with Spring Boot, and it also takes for-eh-ver to get to the point where it can run my code. According to the logs, it's a lot of walking the classpath to find every different class and figure out how to assemble them into an application. Because heaven forbid someone call a constructor to make the object they want.