I never had issues with token use at this scale. More so i would say a huge bloated framework uses more tokens as the LLM might read the source to understand why something works as it does. With stdlib only most LLM already knows it.

Also a laravel "rate limiter" sound suss. Its probably needs some extra dependency like redis + a supporting php library to work. On the contrary i can mock up a reasonably efficient in memory rate limiter in pure Go, and only go to redis when i need the scale.