How to auth with laravel 5.4

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PHP

Hey there. I am unable to get anything to work because of the thousands of micro PHP classes scattered across another thousand folders created by Laravel. I keep getting all sorts of funny errors just by trying to see an application can actually work in Laravel and that it's not a myth. First, I had to wrestle with all the suggestion on this issue[^]. Painfully, the answer that helped me was the penultimate on such a long long thread of framework contributors living in denial. I've encountered dozens more, scoured tutorial sites, read Authentication - Laravel - The PHP Framework For Web Artisans[^] and stackoverflow questions with outdated answers to the cryptic errors I've been riddled with. This has been on for the past 7 days.

Some of the errors would have been avoidable if my auth table name was simply "users" and even now I've changed to "users", I'm still stuck.

What I have tried:

I eventually logged in at some point by removing this line

$this->middleware('auth');
from the HomeController constructor then manually setting up my own auth like I would have done in 30 mins if I was developing from scratch. But it felt contrived. The tutorials say everything should work out of the box without touching any native PHP functions so I uncommented the line and continued writhing.

The present situation is that the login form just lies there even though I've manually seeded my database. From the web.php file (which I understand is neo routes.php), I have

Route::post('/login', 'HomeController@loginPost');

Then in its controller, the latest snippet I've tried is this

public function loginPost() {
        var_dump(Input::all());
        if (Auth::attempt(Input::all())) {
            var_dump('expression');
        User::create([
        'username' => strtolower(Input::get('username')),
        'password' => Hash::make(Input::get('password')),
        ]);

$user = User::where('username', '=', strtolower(Input::get('username')));

Auth::login($user);
        }
        else var_dump('expression2');
    }

It's probably supposed to be email there instead of username but I did a replace all in the view, swapping email for username since the application's authentication ID should be their usernames and not their emails. When I hit enter now, the page just reloads with empty input fields. It's even tired of throwing errors at me. Is there a way out or is Laravel just not for me?