I made this decision about four years ago and while the documentation was well maintained at the time I was concerned that the Laracasts would be unmaintained and become a source of confusion that talked about no longer present features. I was mostly afraid about the primary problem with over-documentation: you're introducing a maintenance cost which, if you ever stop paying, ends up quickly causing more harm than never having had the documentation in the first place.
Here[1], for instance, is someone in this very response thread talking about how the core getting started Laracasts are out of date and they're confused which documentation they should reference. This will probably be addressed pretty soon (see the comment) but I think this is a very real danger with promising to deliver non-text based documentation.
Laravel 9 was released today (hence this thread) - Laravel 8 is the major version that came out directly before Laravel 9. Further, Laravel 9 is essentially Laravel 8 with a bump to the dependencies, with most higher impact changes coming as a result of those dependencies being updated[1]. The Laravel 8 From Scratch series has videos as recently as August[2], with the What's New in Laravel 9 series already having 11 videos[3], with the most recent posted yesterday. The Laracasts video series are still very much actively updated (with Jeffrey, who runs it adding new teachers in the last year).
And Laracasts is a 3rd party learning resource anyway, with the first party docs all being well maintained.
I think it's safe to view Laracasts as being "sold" as part of the documentation officially accessible - and documentation should be ready before a release is pushed into public release. I absolutely sympathize if I've got the wrong impression of Laracasts (though maybe they should be less frequently promoted by Laravel itself if that's the case) and I completely understand that it takes time to record updated audio-visual tutorials... but that's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about - those prominent audio-visual tutorials existing and being pretty officially associated with Laravel means that new users trying to learn the system have windows where the documentation is confusing and out of date.
It seems like an unnecessary risk to have adopted given that it's not at all standard in the industry - sometimes language designers will give a version specific tutorial but they're understood to be unmaintained with the docos being the official source... Laracasts are a very different thing which appear to be mostly working, but seem really likely to dramatically and suddenly become more of a danger than a benefit.
One parallel I would draw on is the community effort, when PHP 5.3 or 5.4 came out, to purge all the terrible advice from StackOverflow. PHP had an issue, its documentation on php.net was fine and followed best practices, but the StackOverflow answers were often _terrible_ like - this will cause a big gaping hole in your security instantly terrible. It took a significant amount of effort to delete or properly answer these sources and since that happened the reputation of PHP has hugely improved. Bad documentation existing is worse than no documentation existing (but please don't take this as an excuse to not comment your code, just be conservative in your comments and keep it to a level you can actually afford to maintain).
Here[1], for instance, is someone in this very response thread talking about how the core getting started Laracasts are out of date and they're confused which documentation they should reference. This will probably be addressed pretty soon (see the comment) but I think this is a very real danger with promising to deliver non-text based documentation.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30261801