I dunno... Their home page looks like something out of the Panera Bread playbook looking at the homepage. 'Web artisans'? Why is it 'clean' because it has an absurd amount of whitespace and comments of platitudes for the code example?
From the home page of a few other frameworks:
Django: "The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines."
Flask: "Web development, one drop at a time"
Express: "Fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for Node.js"
Pyramid: "You need a Python web framework that supports your decisions, by artisans for artisans."
Why is it clean? Build an application with Laravel and you'll find out. :) The documentation and community are excellent. I've used many frameworks across many different languages, and (imo) it really is very nice to work in.
It's funny how the most negativity comes from people with very little experience, or at least recent experience, in the thing that they don't like.
Working with both Laravel and Rails will make it clearer that they try to follow the same principles of convention over configuration and programmer happiness :).
Then there is Laravel, why "artisans?" The word generally means pre-industrial. In my mind, that evokes devs doing edits on live code. Also, "Laravel" sounds like something to do with larvae.
Then there's Drupal, which for the longest time was "community plumbing," which did match the experience of having to call someone in for mysterious specialist emergencies.