I'm not quite sure what you're looking for, but the term "non-binary data" is sending me haha

Anyways. I've used Laravel for about a year now, and it's ..fine. I don't like the push towards AI slop or their constant attempts to push their own cloud services or whatever onto you either, but it hasn't been much of a hassle to just ignore that part.

What I like about Laravel is just how opinionated the framework and the documentation is (like how it wants you to build Factories and set up proper test data when making new database Entities, and how the Inertia routes encourage a clear schema). It's also been pretty pleasant to get the basics right out of the box, like proper auth and login functions. And I like the kind of stuff that you can do with blade templates! I'm using them to serve dynamically generated SVG files and it works really well.

I haven't really needed any sort of crazy file management things though, so my opinions might be completely irrelevant to your use case. In fact, my Laravel project is really not set up for any sort of large data, since that's just not a thing I need. I'm running it in an AWS EC2 instance (the smallest one, as that's included in the AWS Free tier) with just an sqlite database right in there. If I suddenly wanted to manage files in my application, I'd probably be looking at doing that with AWS S3 buckets. Which would work I guess, but I personally really prefer interfacing with S3 buckets via AWS Lambda, and those work much better with Node, Go, Ruby or Python. I'd probably be leaning towards Node, since that's just what I'm most familiar with. Doesn't mean that it's the choice I'd recommend, because your project might have completely different technical requirements! Web dev is a confusing clusterfuck of edgecases.

If Laravel looks like it works for your requirements right now I'd say go for it. No one knows what the future looks like - it could be completely enshittified in a year, or it could be totally fine because the maintainers have just been riding the AI hype for marketing clout while still making a decent framework. If you stick to decent coding practices, switching to a completely different framework really won't be the end of the world.

Alternatively, since you're looking to hire someone for your project, maybe just focus on finding the most capable engineer you can and let them choose whatever tech stack they seem fitting? They'd probably have a much better understanding of your requirements and could make choices that work well together contextually.