On the other hand, this "problem" only affects vibe coders who weren't writing any code themselves anyway, so I say let them suffer.
And yeah, there's also facades.
The code discipline and patterns they encourage are so bad that they had to wrap PhpUnit into their own version of the unit test framework named Pest, because PhpUnit intentionally discourages those patterns natively.
>single-handedly keeping PHP relevant
While architecture astronauts are clutching pearls, I've built multiple profitable products with Laravel without caring the slighest about the internals, both before and after AI.
PHP was always all about just building stuff while ignoring code quality. Laravel is a natural extension of that approach. Let us live.
Most people like you who don't care about code quality and want to "just build" another B2B SaaS unmaintainable pile of spaghetti are now purely relying on AI and not writing any code themselves anymore, so why use PHP at all instead of JS like all the other vibe coders?
Because there is nothing remotely close to Laravel for JS. I don't want to think about auth, job queues, mailing, cache layers, auditing etc. I want an opinionated default from my framework that is thoroughly documented and part of the AI training corpus. Laravel gives that to me.