Laravel really forces you to do things the "Laravel way" and as soon as you try to step outside that box you run into tons of headaches along the way, and upgrades become painful. I haven't found that to be the case with Phoenix at all.

There's also lots of "magic" going in in Laravel behind the scenes and it can be pretty painful to try and figure out exactly why something happened.

Livewire was a mess over all. It had a lot of breaking changes along the way and performance was terrible for anything but the most basic tasks. The support was poor; the docs were alright at best, the screencasts were paid, and Caleb never showed his face in his own Discord, which was troublesome because there weren't enough people using it for the community to support each other. The weird bugs and behaviour were all over the place and the errors you received when you ran into one of them did nothing to help you track it down.

I guess to sum up my feelings: PHP was fine but Elixir did click better. Laravel is a black box and Phoenix is objectively a better framework.