This is totally fair. A few years back I worked on a Laravel project when both me and the other dev were fairly new to Laravel, and neither of us were particula

This is totally fair. A few years back I worked on a Laravel project when both me and the other dev were fairly new to Laravel, and neither of us were particularly adept sysadmins. Forge was a life-saver when it came time to deploy. Now that I'm _much_ more experienced with Linux server management, I found a mix of Laravel's official deployment docs and some community tutorials more than enough to spin up my Laravel apps on Digital Ocean. I think that Laravel providing Forge as an official happy path for deployment is to the benefit of newer Laravel developers. I've listened to the hosts of the Django Chat Podcast lament about deployment being a big hurdle for newer Django developers. I'm glad that Laravel has an easy button. As someone who is now more experienced, I'm also glad that I don't feel forced to use Forge and other services by the Laravel team. I might use it again at some point though.