Would someone not say that in a face to face conversation? I certainly would.

I think the phrase web artisan is embarrassingly twee, like most (over)usage of the words artisan/craft etc. etc.

It's built by and around the Laravel community but it's not exclusive to Laravel just like any Laravel programmer is not only a Laravel programmer. They are of course PHP programmers and many (most) also know other back end languages, front end, etc.

Even the jobs up during our soft launch reflect this. You'll see jobs for Rails developers and customer support already listed as well as general PHP developers, non-Laravel specific.