It's the featured book on the Leanpub homepage (https://leanpub.com/) right now, and it's doing really well.
(Disclosure: Leanpub cofounder here.)
I've only made a couple of sites using Laravel but I actually really like it and haven't hit any performance bottlenecks yet.
It has good documentation (available here[0] for version four) and the code is filled with comments if the documentation isn't enough.
It uses "Eloquent ORM" which makes it so easy to handle data with Active Record.
RESTful controllers makes it easy to handle the request.
And much more, which is why you need to read the documentation to understand why it's different.
