[_1tem]

Agreed that Volt/Mix is bad, but I haven't touched it since setting it up the first time. It doesn't bother me day-to-day.

I try to avoid hacking the framework or needing to know it's magic. The point of an opinionated framework is to just do things their way. This works for me 95% of the time. The few times I need to do something non-standard, I don't mind spending time hacking.

It sounds like you're building a lot of new projects in Laravel rather than maintaining a single one over the years.