@jlrdw There's nothing "wrong" with it, I think it has just generally fell out of favor and because of that particularly newer Laravel devs may not recognize it as easily, which depending on your project and team (if any) may or may not be a concern.

I think that's an important point, what is readable to you may not be for others. Take his last example of the check function, you could write that as a one line complex if like:

<?php

function check($scp, $uid)
{
    return $scp === 'public' 
        || Auth::id() === $uid
        || Auth::user()->hasRole('admin');
}

Sure its more compact but you may or may not find that readable. Readability is like beauty, its in the eye of the beholder mostly, but there are some generally accepted principals most of us can agree on.

And at the end of the day the most important thing is consistency. If you are going to use compact() always do it that way, don't have some methods or some controllers that use compact() while others pass in an array for example.

Writing Code for Humans