I was a little scared by the heavy use of static method calls in Laravel 4. L5 has made the statics easier to ignore if that is not your thing.
But after understanding the Facade pattern that is widely used by the framework, I've concluded that the use of the static method calls is not an antipattern at all.
It really is less of an antipattern in PHP than other languages. With every request being its own process you don't have to worry about singletons as much, and as long as it's easy to swap with mocks/fakes/whatever it's all good.
But after understanding the Facade pattern that is widely used by the framework, I've concluded that the use of the static method calls is not an antipattern at all.