You can throw it into lambda or vercel for that matter too. Yes you can use sketchy hosts but still can use legit ones too to host for free or very little money.
> , they compromise in every other way. Architecture, performance, testability and so on and so on.
Architecture: The default structure of the app is good to start out and can be changed at any time. You are not locked into that. If you apply your fancy patterns, you can do whatever you want. It's rather a devs fault than the frameworks fault.
Performance: Guess depends on what you compare it to. Surely a rust service will be more performant, however you can scale laravel just fine if you are not writing shit code. There is enough apps built in laravel that handle more load than the average pro reddit coder will ever see.
Testability: Not sure what you mean, you can test in different ways and anything you need to test. It's fairly simply too. Yes, there are sometimes issues where you can run into memory leaks but those can be fixable after some digging.
You can but don't need to use facades, you can go full DI, you can swap the IC.
The Irreducible, unfixable tech debt is created by the developer that wrote it and does not know php or laravel. Yes, laravel makes it easy for newcomers to get right into the traps you mentioned, but then again - we are talking about junior that would not know any better and probably would fail without it.
Laravel has inertia, livewire or alpine to get reactive/snappy frontends if you want to have an SPA. Inertia lets you use your react while not needing to write an api. Livewire drops the js completely and does the SPA-esque frontend with php, alpine is just a smol lib to make parts of the website interactive.
Generally speaking, if you use PHP to build an API, you can use react still as is.