Is Laravel going to scale when we get traction?

Yes, with proper architecture. Laravel scales to extreme traffic when set up correctly: Octane plus Horizon plus Redis plus a sensible database strategy (read replicas, careful indexing, query optimisation). The Laravel applications running at the largest scale handle 100 million plus requests per day. Where Laravel scaling breaks is not the framework, it is the architecture: N plus 1 queries in hot paths, missing queue jobs, single instance bottlenecks, lack of caching. We build MVPs with these scale traps already addressed, so when traffic lands the application does not need a rewrite.