Earlier quoted context omitted.
I came here to say that, as someone who's used both Rails and Laravel. Basically it comes down to magical behavior, and the fact that Rails has way too much of it. Syntactic sugar and DSLs are maybe fine for rolling out new projects, but become burdensome on large codebases. I was on a large project and found myself in goto hell where I literally couldn't trace through the code. It was relying on every magic trick in…
So what do you like then?
Today I mostly write solutions in a synchronous-blocking, functional-reactive, event-driven, immutable, stateless, data-driven, declarative manner that tries to avoid custom types/objects, manually managing nulls or asynchronous behavior. Which if all orchestrated correctly, leads to future-proof code because it's so obvious that it's self-documenting and the failure modes are all safe.
IMHO, the vast majority of software out there involving Javascript, Ruby, Python, really any of the imperative languages, can't achieve what I'm trying to do. It even feels like they actively work against me sometimes. I think of Laravel as getting most of the interfaces and approaches conceptually correct, even if the internals use factories and patterns and hand waving that I consider spaghetti. Whereas Rails involves some element of drinking the kool-aid, because it encourages some conceptually incorrect approaches like ignoring process separation to achieve better performance or fit with some preexisting notion of what's beautiful or easy. Along those lines, probably stuff like Phoenix/Elixer, Erlang, etc are closest to what I'm working towards, but they introduce their own custom syntax that strikes me as perhaps too DSL-like and I have an aversion to that. Which is the main reason why I struggle to learn stuff like Haskell.
There truly are vanishly few actually good solutions today, and I've been following web development for over 25 years now. That used to really get me down. But I realize now that the situation presents an opportunity to fix things and build a better future, which I am grateful for.