ABAC in Production: What Actually Breaks

Implementing ABAC for 25 million users reveals that stale attributes, rule explosion, missing enforcement points, and silent decisions cause production failures rather than policies. Simultaneously, Laravel 12 bug fixes ended August 13, 2026, with security patches expiring February 24, 2027. While Laravel 13 is a small upgrade taking roughly 10 minutes, it contains two high-impact, two medium-impact, and fifteen low-impact breaking changes, particularly affecting PHP object caching and MySQL upsert functionality in production applications.