> The only thing I can agree is deploying, which is pretty daunting compared to Laravel

This really isn't true anymore. There are 4 different official guides for deployment[1], and none take much more than 30 minutes. Fly and Heroku are basically trivial. Using render[2] might be even easier. Setting up SSL is harder than deploying phoenix these days.

[1] https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/deployment.html

[2] https://render.com/docs/deploy-phoenix