I struggled with sorting out Contracts vs Facades vs Traits. I graduated from university 20 years ago with a software engineering degree, where it was drummed into me that simpler often is better, and much more robust. Reading the Laravel docs however, leaves more questions than I started off with.
eg. https://laravel.com/docs/5.8/contracts – talks a lot about how Contracts are powerful additions (like all the other features of Laravel, the docs are good at telling you they're powerful) and the examples show just some barebones code that doesn't really do much without a lot more work. The examples in the documentation seem to be more on the side of being some code snippets that don't convey much context.
Additionally, there's lots of "congratulatory" text in the documentation ("Laravel has a powerful feature called ", "in Laravel adding is actually really simple", "some developers enjoy using ". You simply don't see this in PHP.net's docs, it just tells you what the function / feature is, gives you examples that work straight out of the box, lets you know of any pitfalls or differences in PHP versions to watch out for, and there's a whole list of comments contributed by other PHP devs spanning years, that are up/downvoted.
Another example of powerful documentation was that I learnt what MPTT is, and how to implement it effectively, purely from CakePHP docs back in the day (I'm talking v2 here). I can't see how anything as remotely useful would be able to be taught from Laravel docs alone; for someone who doesn't have a computer science degree, there would be a LOT of tabs open, full of rabbit holes that need to be explored. This is not effective documentation in my eyes.
The difference between these sets of documentation is like night and day to me. The Laravel docs needs to stop patting itself on the back, and be more like other software projects' documentation.
Don't get me wrong, I love working with Laravel, it is powerful. My issue is with the documentation, which leaves a lot to be desired.