Laravel 8 has a nice feature secret route for maintenance bypass. You can get this feature in Laravel 6 or laravel 6 with a simple package called haruncpi/laravel-maintenance.
You can unguard all your Models instead of setting the protected guarded variable to an empty array in each App\Models\YourModel class using Model::unguard() in the boot method of AppServiceProvider class.
if you want to run custom validation having a long function in laravel request file, you can use the following tricks to get the things done using withValidator method.
Monitor user activity on laravel application with Laravel user activity package. It has build-in beautiful responsive & user-friendly UI with various useful features.
Laravel package to let you manage de-normalized tables with simple configurations. Just add array based config in your models and it will automatically sync your denormalized tables. https://github.com/tkeer/flattable