Are you in the US? There are TONS of PHP jobs here in the UK (possibly second to JavaScript, although there are a lot of Java jobs too), and I hear that in general PHP is very popular in Europe, whereas Ruby is more popular in the US (some people use ruby here, but not many).
Laravel is not only fine, but one of the best frameworks I've ever used. It's like rails/django, but less opinionated in all the right ways (while still providing loads out of the box). I think PHP has a very bright future.
I'm just saying that I don't see any job listings for them as an interviewee, or see any resumes with them as an interviewer. In contrast to other technologies that HN or Reddit declare to be "dead" or "dying", yet actually seem to run the world with no serious disruption on the horizon yet.