I find Livewire a pleasure to work with. It's certainly not a hammer for every nail, but a refreshing step away from the JavaScript madness without sacrificing all of the good parts about it (anything async, basically).
Breeze and Jetstream are more recent optional packages, and Laravel is still productive without them. So effectively you are saying, “I wish Docker Hub had fewer images available, it’s more productive without.” Pfffft
The "hop in and be productive" part is directly related to Laravel being pretty opinionated. It's hard to have the one without the other. I think it's comparable to Steve Jobs, who had pretty strong opinions about certain things, too. The end result is a "product" that doesn't try to be the right fit for everyone.
Livewire, just like Jetstream[1] etc. is opt-in. When Jetstream was introduced, there was quite an uproar (by parts of the community) about Laravel forcing users into Livewire or Inertia[2]. The end result was (imho) a very healthy shift in communication around it (to emphasize the opt-in part), followed by the introduction of Breeze[3], which goes to show that Taylor does recognize the reservations some people may have about those new shiny toys.
It's a very natural thing that big projects like that will have an ever-growing feature set. That is an important part of keeping existing users excited. The Jetstream-discussion has been an important lesson for the team (I hope) and I'm glad it ended the way it did.
You can still build your Laravel app in a pretty similar fashion as you would have done 5 years ago and if you want, you can make use of the recent additions, so I think there's not too much to worry about to be honest. If you have outgrown the magic, isn't it pretty amazing that you can drop down one level of abstraction and just use symfony? Also, do you think you would've grasped many of the underlying features of symfony, if it wasn't for Laravel's opinionated wrapping in a nicer syntax (pardon my oversimplification)?
Nevertheless, I think it's good to keep up the warning signs and have this discussion from time to time. ;-)
[1] https://github.com/laravel/jetstream [2] https://inertiajs.com/ [3] https://github.com/laravel/breeze
What I found is that this is a good idea in _some_ contexts, namely if you can and want to treat the browser as a rendering engine for state snapshots. If you break with that assumption, you want something else, or you'll be slowly creeping into an ad-hoc, complicated mess, where there is no clear abstraction boundary for the UI. You just end up smearing it all over your code.
There are some fundamental reasons for this.
A technical one is that HTML isn't just data representation. It also dominates the shape of your UI tree. Do we really want to complect these things? The separation between HTML, CSS and JS is extremely leaky and blurry. The more you try to pull them apart, the more painful it gets. It's also the ultimate de-normalization of your data. Meaning it's going to be a huge PITA to coordinate if its not done in one coherent place.
Another issue is that you are breaking a separation of concerns and encapsulation. Does the server really have to know how I just toggled a menu, rearranged some widgets with drag-n-drop or switched a stylesheet? Trivially no. The server might care about some of that happening after the fact, but almost never about the details of how.
But this gets even more pronounced when you implement features touching on security, consistency and reliability. With a clearer UI and server separation you have two distinct mental models or modes. On the front-end you only care about the user experience and optimize for that: Immediate feedback, guiding messages, visualization and transitions. You can treat the user as your best friend and fulfill all of their wishes. But on the server you treat them as an incompetent stranger and/or as and adversary. Because, you know, its the Web! With this separation you enable focus and avoid mental taxation mixing things up. It's ultimately a simplification in the pure sense of the word.
With all that said, I don't doubt that many find this paradigm useful, especially because of what you said in your last sentence. And I'm sure that in many cases you can work around the problems I mentioned, or even model them well if you don't break with the assumption I mentioned at the start. But if you do anything interesting _in_ the browser you'll likely be forced to patch over the fact that you are now smearing your front-end logic all over places.