Justified? Advocate for better Laravel Code Base

This pops up every now and again, the points are at least 4 years old

As this user points out, the 2 major points are mostly:

1. Eloquent/Active Record

Answer: Don't use it then. You can just use the Query Builder.

1. Facades

Answer: Don't use it then. They are also disabled in Lumen (though can be enabled with $app->withFacades()).

Apart from that, Larastan is a static analyzer that understands Laravel magic and you can use barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper for your IDE as he pointed out in his article.

I would say no not justified. Taylor Made laravel very flexible and easy to use.

For some large queries requiring join and group by, I use getPdo(), which is the PDO instance. Of course I bind necessary parameters.

But the point is there are many ways to use laravel without just using active record.

But I do like facades also, I like the static looking calls and that's just my preference.