I don't know for big instances of Laravel, for every deployment pipelines of Symphony I've seen were far from "Drop that file on the server. The end."
In the most primitive ways, you would at least do cache warming, which usually means "building" the app instance in a separate folder and swapping the active directory served by the web server. That's basically what a basic Capistrano deploy would do.
Nowadays I'd expect most shops to be using containers for PHP too, and that means building your container like any other language.
What I'm saying is, the days where PHP deployment was simple have been long gone, for at least a decade in my experience.
In the most primitive ways, you would at least do cache warming, which usually means "building" the app instance in a separate folder and swapping the active directory served by the web server. That's basically what a basic Capistrano deploy would do.
Nowadays I'd expect most shops to be using containers for PHP too, and that means building your container like any other language.
What I'm saying is, the days where PHP deployment was simple have been long gone, for at least a decade in my experience.