I do a LOT or prototyping in vanilla PHP, but once a project starts to take shape, I begin to look at whether Laravel is a good fit. One of the main things I have to consider here is who is on my team or contributing externally.

I have a background with PHP that goes back nearly 20 years, so I have a fair number of teammates that are familiar with the language and have years of experience with Laravel. This makes it an obvious choice for a framework.