And yet thousands of companies use Laravel and Eloquent...Because the consumer of a thing does not necessarily care about the architecture. Because that architecture very rarely impacts your problem domain.

Look, I can see where you are coming from. About 8 years ago in my career I thought much the same. Harder for developers was OK as long as the architecture was "correct". But everything is a trade off. 'purity' in architecture usually has productivity trade offs. It is often beneficial to go faster first, and change if and when it becomes a problem. This is doubly the case when using somebody else's stuff. So DX matters a hell of a lot because it greatly reduces the comprehension load of a given library or solution and has a marked impact on productivity (and thus time to market).

And you making a sweeping statement like you "wouldn't hire a developer that would tell you in an interview that he'd selected a poorly architected solution just because the method calls are more convenient" is overly general and pig headed. And honestly with an attitude like that I would never allow you to make decisions on hiring people. Heck I wouldn't let you within 10 metres of the interview room with an attitude like that.

In one overly general rant, you manage to suggest that Eloquent is somehow "poorly architected" (it is not. It certainly has it's problems, there are certainly things that could, or even should be done, but to claim that it is poor and by implication claim that yours is somehow great is the kind of self important dickheadery that we've come to expect from you here). It also suggests that the developer made the choice "simply because" it's method calls were more convenient - which is probably not the whole story.

But even if I grant you that it is the whole story, if that simpler API means that the developer could demonstrate that he is going to get my product to market faster (because simplicity, ubiquity, availability of other devs who know the thing etc..whatever), I'd hire the guy on the spot over a guy who read clean coding once and suddenly thinks of himself as an architecture astronaut.