Haha we had the exact same experience. My mind was blown by PHP as a teen and I even made decent money in high school making websites - all without ever setting up a local environment.

I didn’t keep doing dev work and had a different career but changed back to development a few years ago (also mostly TS). I’ve also been curious for a while about what it’d feel like to start a new project in Lavarel instead of Next.js or Sveltekit like usual.