what about deployment? I assume I need to scp files like Python or keep everything in a single giant PHP file? is that an option?

Deployment these days is essentially git pull && composer update

Of course not if you use vm or serverless or whatever like this, but for a basic here is my crude app, that's what you do.

Or if you want to go old school sure, just scp that directory, it still works like it did 30 years ago.

Laravel Forge handles auto-deployment on push to master. Or if you want production zero downtime deployments, use Laravel Envoyer.