Ruby on Rails vs Laravel. In 1 Minute.

Laravel can work with any database. Most PHP devs choose SQL because "tradition/experience" but Laravel can run with any DB stack.

There are full tutorials out there on how to connect to eg. MongoDB. And it's very easy to do. You can keep using Eloquent as db builder.

Laravel has 5 default adapters for the database and is not mainly optimised for MySQL ( it even has more postgres features than mysql ):
MariaDB 10.3+
MySQL 5.7+
PostgreSQL 10.0+
SQLite 3.8.8+
SQL Server 2017+

And a lot more from the community ( like Mongo, Firestore, AWS Dynamo DB )

on TechEmpower benchmarks Laravel was a little above Rails, being faster on queries, but Rails was faster on JSON and plain text requests.