One of my VPS hosts (a wonderful UK-based company) recently encouraged me to move my VPS to their more modern platform. So I've spun up a new VPS and am manually migrating side-project sites/apps to it.
Most of these are Laravel. Some are fairly major upgrades.
And I'm reminded – having been away from it for a while – of just how nice it is to work with.
Sure it's not for everyone. But it has great docs, amazing tooling, and such a good developer experience.