I've had the misfortune of being forced to use Laravel on a project, and the larval connotations are pretty apt. Basically it's yet another PHP framework that adds megabytes of bloat to your application in order to give you alternate ways of doing things that are already trivial to do in PHP without providing anything that's actually helpful. Its one redeeming 'feature' is that they didn't go too far out of their way to make it incompatible with Composer, so once you work your way through Laraval's inane routing DSL (which, being built upon PHP, is a shitty DSL, and doesn't add any value over an if-else chain anyway) you can reference whatever libraries you need to get the job done without a lot of contortions. Even then, it throws good practice out the window by defaulting to throwing all the application-specific classes in the global namespace (which makes Composer's work harder, since it has to scan the entire app/ directory to build the class -> file map) and failing to provide any way to pass context to your code other than through global state.

Don't even get me started on the ubiquitous, ridiculously verbose, unhelpful, and intelligence-insulting comments. It's this kind of thing that makes me want to take up shooting sprees.