There's an upgrade path, sort of, but more importantly major versions of Drupal live for years. I think we'll keep seeing new D7 projects for at least 2 more years.
The flip side of that question, though, is "where would Laravel be if it were built by committee rather than benevolent dictator?" I'd wager Taylor's "I'm doing shit my way" has been at least part of what has made Laravel so successful.
In my most recent (side) project, I'm doing a Yii2 website and I'm feeling like it's not enterprisey enough. I have to go out of my way to figure out the best way to split things apart (which, I guess is good because it doesn't actually make that difficult for me at all - it's just something I have to choose to do)
I'm sure at least some part of that was the previous developer who built the application. But there is absolutely no reason for documentation to not answer the basic questions that seem to come up many times per day in their IRC channel.
I commonly recommend Yii and laud it's extensive documentation and "Definitive Guide" that covers basically everything.
In my current experience as a developer, Yii's documentation is the best I've ever utilized. Much better than any Javadoc I've googled or even php.net's
I've used form libraries from the PHPClasses one back in 2003 through Symfony forms now (which has cognitive overload, and is so flexible as to be restrictive). Most business systems I write are data focused so forms play a massive role in them - and in my developer happiness.
The view/controller layers are very flexible and can be hooked up to anything from an HTML template using Yii to angular/bootstrap (which is what we're using) or another framework to handle the forms.
What I like about it is the flexibility of the ORM, where you can use the model in a sane way but can completely toss it aside and just use SQL for those edge cases that would be a PITA in something like Django.
I like Laravel Elixir (the npm package) and Eloquent (the ORM). Laravel itself is overly complex and the learning curve keeps getting higher. I'm much happier with Slim 3
It works pretty well.
Some related discussion here: https://laracasts.com/index.php/discuss/channels/general-dis...
You think that feels enterprisy? Try Symfony, and listen to the community, with its "way to do things" that change every 6 months depending what's in vogue - and each time are invariably more abstract and complicated.
When you step outside these mini ecosystems and look at PHP as a vanilla tool to work or to use a proper micro/full framework you start to question why use PHP at all? One possibly acceptable framework, in my opinion, is Laravel. The problem is PHP outside of these mini ecosystems isn't nearly as popular. It looks like people migrate to an entire new language like Python, Ruby, Node, etc. If we're talking about sheer people hiring Ruby, Node and Python typically trump PHP every time and are using frameworks - not Drupal or WordPress. Granted there are custom PHP apps out there and some very good ones but they're not the norm.
I switched full-time to Python using Flask and Django. It's like a breath of fresh air. My 2 cents is if you're on the fence, figure out how to work on one project using this new language full-time. Then you can make a better decision.