I write an article why I regret PHP and (of course) Laravel is included here.

https://medium.com/cook-php/i-regret-using-php-5e0c6c29e493

And there are many other troubles with Laravel. The main is the performance. Most developers don't care to peek at the code of the framework, I did it (its open source if you want to look at it) and surprise, the code works but it adds a lot of bloated features. It is not strange why Laravel is slow.

About ORM yes and no.

Sometimes you want an ORM and sometimes you don't want it.

ORM works fine for CRUD and it's easy to maintenance.

Raw queries works fine for everything else.

You can use raw queries (or even PDO) in Laravel if you want to.