It is quite obvious that Laravel is written by an American, they all do understand marketing better than us Europeans, Artisans creates works of art and it is eloquent even if it isn't.

What is great about Laravel is all the addons you can apply seamlessly.

But I can't say I like the overall design, too much magic for my taste and all the non-strict typing. Put things in the correct directory and things happen is generally a bad design. Use magic name on class object either as a property or a function and different things happen.

I do understand that it is easier for the framework developer to have loose typing, easier to swap implementations between major versions, but it makes it harder for the framework user. I have to, at least in older Laravel versions, apply a lot of annotations to get a pleasant developer experience.

In every Laravel project I haven been involved in I have needed to read the Laravel framework source code with all its layers to get grip what is actually going on and how it is related to my specific problem. However this have been true for every framework project I have been involved in, Laravel or not.