I've heard this criticism of Laravel a couple times and never understood it. I've been using the framework for years and have never had an issue with upgrades. There is a clear and comprehensive upgrade guide with each release, as well as a third-party package called Laravel Shift that can inspect your code and perform automatic upgrades in many cases. I've found there are only one or two breaking changes per minor version release (which seems reasonable to me), and they are always well-documented.
Aside from that, I'm glad you've highlighted Laravel, which—despite being the most popular server-side Web framework on GitHub—gets virtually no attention from HN. It's typical to use Laravel in the old server-side rendered Rails paradigm (which is still probably best for some applications), but I've had success using it to develop APIs as well. Core features like the ORM, job queues, dependency injection, email templating, etc, are very solid, and the ecosystem of packages around it is phenomenal. I would recommend it to any Web developer.