I'm assuming this article is for 'shock value.' I'm a 25+ year developer and architect. A little over a year ago I worked for a multi-national company that built a microservices based application that served 30 state governments. Guess what we used? That's right. Laravel. You still need to know how to code Beau; to suggest otherwise is absolutely ridiculous and shows your lack of actual experience with Laravel. All languages are moving toward higher and higher levels of abstraction; not just PHP frameworks. It saves devs time by not having us reinvent the wheel. To use an ORM doesn't mean you don't understand SQL (in fact in many cases the ORM can be faster than raw SQL). This article is meant for views and revenue I think. Mission accomplished.