It's the way he's doing it. The entire ecosystem is just one giant ad for various paid projects. It's one thing to offer paid services, there are users out there that want to use them or need to use them, that's not the issue. From my perspective Laravel became a huge ad with purposely bad documentation that ends up directing unknowing users into using features, libraries and products that will lead them into paying for things that they might not need. Everything in Laravel recently is set up so that users folow documentation and best practices to end up using whatever subscriptions and paid products they offer (and then in some case pull the plug on them and come up with something new, abandoning whatever UI library they made people buy 1 year ago).