My experiences with cake and zend back ... 10-12+ years ago... things 'worked' mostly, but there was often a lot of "you can do it any way you want", and often minimal examples for the cases I was trying to achieve. Testing... as much as it was there, my experiences trying to get decent testing never seemed to work very well; Laravel's testing experience felt better out of the box. Testing traits like 'useDatabaseTransaction' to rollback the db after each test seemed both useful and novel - I don't remember seeing things like that in Cake (at least not early on - haven't checked recently).
FWIW, I use Laravel a lot these days, but wasn't terribly 'trusting' of it early on. Started seeing it in what I guess were its 3.x days; then saw 4.x - big changes, and what seemed like a moderate amount of BC breakage, then again from 4-5. Around 5.x, it seemed to adopt a bit more of an incremental approach to changes, and I started using it more day to day in the 5 series.
Laravel was awful when everyone else were awful. But around Laravel 5.5 (and PHP 7) it was complete enough, documented enough and fast enough, that you could just start building stuff with it without having to think about it. Is Laravel the best Framework out there? Not at all! But is also not considered harmful, far from it.
Laravel was the first framework, that "just worked" and had everything, you need to make your first steps in a web application. Nowadays, people write PHP components that are usable in Laravel and that means a lot of code out there is compatible to a lot of other code. That alone did a lot to the PHP community. 2010 or so, the PHP landscape was much more scattered and things didn't look good.
Since then a lot happened and Laravel carries old stuff with it, and I'm very happy about that! I'd hate to be forced to do big refactoring work on every update of the framework. As strange as some decisions in Laravel are, they try new things, and they also try to stay compatible to the old stuff. Between Laravel 5.5 (released 2017) and 10 there were not much breaking changes. For a framework, this is a big plus.