Ah sure—my point was less that I don't understand it (I'm very familiar with Laravel's auth system) and more that there are a lot of extra security consideratio

Ah sure—my point was less that I don't understand it (I'm very familiar with Laravel's auth system) and more that there are a lot of extra security considerations beyond the basic logging in, that I don't consider myself in a good position to keep on top of. I don't disagree though; having tons of stuff available in the framework does give less incentive to learn how it all actually works, and I do worry that my base programming skills may atrophy (though for me this is more because a large portion of my workload is fairly uninteresting CRUD stuff). > I can imagine truly horrific bespoke hand-rolled frameworks that you probably have in mind. I won't defend those, haha. This is probably one of those things where your preferences are determined by what just happened to burn you the most so far which is most likely a coin flip. Agreed completely. My personal experience with PHP development has been 50% an awful undocumented "framework" written by a guy who no longer works at the company, and 50% Laravel on PHP >= 7. So yeah, I suppose it should be no surprise that I like Laravel!