I keep coming back to the same thought. A lot of the modern web stack quietly pushes you into SaaS funnels and tight vendor lock-in. The Vercel and Next.js gravity is real. The convenience is obvious, but so is the long-term constraint.
Laravel sits somewhere very different. You get a full, coherent system out of the box without being forced into a single runtime or pricing model. The core team and ecosystem are clearly leaning into AI-assisted development, and it shows. The structure, conventions, and tooling are exactly the kind of thing AI works well with.
It is still strange that in 2026 PHP is seen as old fashioned. That just does not match reality. Strong static analysis with PHPStan and Larastan. Proper testing. Solid linting. SSR options through Inertia with React or Vue. It is a very complete environment.
Right now I am building an app with a fully typed Laravel backend and a React plus shadcn frontend. It is genuinely pleasant to work in. Pair that with S3-compatible storage, an RDS database, stateless deploys, and a small load balancer, and scaling is straightforward.
Hard to shake the feeling that Laravel is quietly one of the most productive and future-proof stacks in the AI era. Not old fashioned at all. Just underestimated.