Maybe you can make a PR to correct the error, so that author is aware of missconfiguration?
EDIT: I did open an issue.
I would refer you to TechEmpower's benchmarks anyway: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/
Laravel is known to be slower than other frameworks. But it's still in the 50-200ms response time. I just deployed an app to an AWS medium node, and basic pages respond in 31ms. DB intensive pages run in 55ms.
^ this is a production app/environment.