See what you need.
If you need a fast ready-made forum with typical functionality, phpbb or any other script is your choice. If the functionality is non-standard, speed is important, you don’t need extra, a minimum of code, in general, you don’t need a monster - then you can write it yourself on laravel, any other framework, or, as they sometimes do, on a set of components (fastroute, request, di, template , qb ) adding new ones as needed.
Advantages of laravel: Authorization is out of the box, qb, di, blade.
Add a couple of entities, controllers and the simplest forum is ready. If necessary, adding the necessary functionality will be easier and faster, since you don’t have to delve into the engine. The speed of development will not be inferior to writing modifications of ready-made engines, because without studying the engine, finding answers in the articles "simple from, how to make ..." - sooner or later you will understand how much slag you have done, and you will have to rewrite everything to make it right. Some manage to change the engine code, which freezes updates, while some code itself asks to change its core, since there is no other way to achieve certain functionality, especially the old code sins with this.
I do not fully agree with those who talk about the bike, since it depends on the required functionality. Over the past couple of years, I have ruled the code for the "guru of non-bicycle building", when atypical functionality was required for a regular cms or store - if the new code was written as the correct extension - it was already good, it was clear from the code itself - that apart from "how to make simple extension" people didn’t read, because in order to study a sufficiently large core, it doesn’t even take a couple of days, and after studying it, everything needs to be deposited in the head.
You also need to take into account that the very modularity of ready-made engines will recoup either on speed, or on the possibilities of modification, or on complexity, or maybe on everything at once.
When they create something complicated on wp, it’s a pleasure to kill, but the engine is working, millions of sites, yes, you can add a template engine, laravel, etc., but why? It's easier to write laravel code to display articles.
I'm working on a website with 8 million views a day. Written in dle - this is the most common cms in RuNet, and paid, but whoever saw the code does not sleep at night. It also started - they took a ready-made solution, once a revision, ..., n revision, and then you look - fuck. The functionality no longer climbs, the speed is not enough, the core is all rewritten. As a result, the entire user part was rewritten to the framework with grief in half, because the finished solution put its own characteristics on the project architecture. Only the admin panel remained from the decision, in which there is little left, not rewritten simply because there is no time.
But if earlier, struggling with the architecture of a boxed solution, it took a day to complete a task - now it takes an hour. Although they dragged on with the transfer to the last, the year was already strained to invent crutches, etc. A lot of money would have been saved if they had transferred to the framework a year ago, not to mention the fact that if they had started immediately write on a framework, and even on bare php, since during development it was clear that a blogger is 1% of the functionality.
Although you should also avoid your own decisions, there was a project - written by a programmer from scratch, all the code was written by him, but there was not enough experience - he messed up the architecture, well, there was a tin - no autoloading classes, no namespaces, I wanted modularity like in cms. One cannot write such a thing, at least for the standard project period. As a result - it is rewritten on frejmvork. I would take ready-made components + typical mvc architecture - there would be no problems.
My advice: look according to needs - time - money.

Google flarum, only it has been in beta for several years, it is made on Laravel components.

Yes. And Laracasts even has a good full course on writing a forum (Both the server part, and js and wysiwyg are there) - https://laracasts.com/series/lets-build-a-forum-wi...
ps Just as easy is freely available on the net, or on torrents, although a subscription to laracasts costs only 1k/month, 6k/year.
pps For starters, I advise the documentation and the free course from them "Laravel 5.4 from scratch" - https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-from-scratch-2017

See what the goal is. If you want to develop, then why do you need a ready-made engine? If you want more freedom and development experience, take Lara, you need a quick result, look towards forum engines. Not necessarily phpBB, there are many.