I've been using Laravel on and off for many years but mostly for smaller projects with little budget, so I've never really updated them past Laravel 7.
In the latest year or so I decided to do some updates and see what's new (mainly because of a couple of new projects where Livewire looked like a good solution)...and to my shame I've only recently realised that they vastly improved the ability to add library components, simply by using "" + props! So now I'm going back and improving some of the larger projects.
Is anyone else discovering bits they didn't know existed? It doesn't have to be Laravel-based.
Like, one of my bigger projects used ES5 dynamic Js importing and webpack mixins (and WebChunk names), but to figure out what Js I needed I had app.js do a look-up on the domain path. If path = "/somefolder/someotherfolder" then load x,y,z JS. This was fine until there was suddenly 40 pages each with their own js requirement. And I've only recently discovered a better way of handling all of this - and discovered that webpack has a WebChunk [name] placeholder which means I can remove 90% of the lookup code and replace it with a much more graceful Js handling system with dynamic naming conventions ( although now I need to figure out how to do it with Vite :S ).
I just seemed to have had a blind spot on some of the more simpler approaches, I guess because I was just trying to stay afloat amidst the more complex parts that are way above me.
This is the result of the combination of self-learning and framework improvements. The entire concept of iterative development is exactly what you're describing: continual improvement over time.
Do not stress about this; in fact, you're doing it exactly how it should be done.
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