That does seem very, uhh, minimalistic, if that's supposed to be the reference documentation. Just one very short sentence per method. Most arguments are unexplained. No examples that I could find.

I'm not sure what you're trying to find. The main Laravel docs are fine for 90% of what you would want to do. If you're digging into the core of some internal class trying to decide if you can re-use something elsewhere, that seems edge-case-y.

The ORM, relationship model, templating, and routing are all thoroughly documented in the main docs. If you want to find out what obscure methods might be available for your custom package, you're probably competent enough to parse the auto-generated code docs or read the source directly (which is also very clear and well organized).

Does Laravel have anything akin to the Rails Guides? (ie, higher level based on what you want to do, rather than API-level documentation)

Rails has a number of "cast" sites as well. There are times however that you just need well organized text documentation.