Rudi Theunissen shares on codeburst.io this very interisting articles about how to use Laravel eloquent in a convenient way
Ever since Laravel 5.3, I’ve seen many cases where Eloquent’s relations and their underlying query builders are not used efficiently. Many of these cases exist because there are multiple paths to the same data, many of which look and feel like equivalent solutions. Unless you are familiar with what’s going on under the hood, it’s not always clear which path would be the better one.