I was with you until the end. Originally doesn’t mean shit. Who cares if Laravel is a Rails clone? For the record, I have no idea if it is, let alone if it is beyond the degree that plenty of other things are “Rails clones”. And this is ignoring the fact that Rails had been inspired plenty by other projects throughout its lifetime, as it should.
I’m interested in using the right tool for the job, not getting caught up in weird inside baseball attribution wars. IMO, PHP is often not the best tool because it’s a shitty language. If it has a “Rails clone”, that makes it better, not worse.