I started my career with Laravel and used it for a long time. There’s considerations when just picking languages databases for what you’re doing, not just frameworks. For example there’s clear use cases for MERN stack over Laravel, Laravel over MERN, or where these two stacks won’t hold up and you’ll need to use something like Go Lang.

Also we have to define what a “big” app is. A blog with a CMS, roles and permissions, user comments, taxonomies, and so on is a big app that most would think of being rather small but is actually a moderately large application. Laravel makes these applications feel small with easy to use ORMs, packages, and stock functionality.

Where Laravel is great is HTTP CRUD web applications. Is it great with applications with a lot of real time components: messengers, notifications, and so on? People will say there’s services like pusher for that, but they become expensive fast and really it’s not in Laravels nature to deal with websockets. It’s also important to take into consideration where your friend might not be wrong. Laravel has positioned itself as a full stack framework, which has led to imo bloated optional packages, with an emphasis that moves away from the increasing trend of single page applications. Does Laravel still do headless well? Yes. But it’s not what tutorials preach. So you can move towards making bloated applications out of what you’re being taught instead of making simple apis.

So big questions off the top of my head while making your decision:

Do you need a relational database?

Are you building something within the scope above? I’ve tried to build interactive apps with Laravel and it wasn’t fun.

Does it need to be extremely performant?

What is “small”?

Do. I need access to a lot of developers for help I may need in the future? (Community is important for newer coders)

Do I need websockets?

Do I want to make a SPA?

If I don’t make a SPA can I pivot later easily?

Am I expecting use websockets? If so how much?

How “big” does the app need to be with what’s known above?

You might get filled with “of course use Laravel” comments in this thread. You need to consider that we don’t know your use case and that with frameworks there’s annoying evangelists that will green light the use of the framework too much. We don’t know your use case and we should not be advising you.