@browniecoffee One thing I always tell newer devs... Validation... make your backend validation first and make it rock solid.
Front end validation has nothing to do with security... it is simply a UX enhancement / convenience to the user to not have to wait for the form to be submitted before seeing an error. It literally does nothing beyond that. If you implement front end validation and skip backend validation, your app will be hacked or messed with VERY quickly.
I suggest watching this amazing video from Laracon EU about how an app can be hacked into by not scrubbing data...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKGGVGiq2y8
I not using Laravel, make sure to implement CSRF protection on all of your forms.
Another good tip is not to expose too much in your APIs. Make sure you scope data only to users that should have it. Any time you are passing an id for information only the logged in user should have like profile info is a red flag. If you have a route that gets profile info like /profile/25 where the user id is 25 and you look that up on the backend using User::find($id) this can be bad because all a user has to do is change ids to access another user's profile. Obviously you can guard against that, but it would be better to use /profile and pull as Auth::user() on the backend.
Utilize Requests and Policies to write authorization and validate everything.