Why are you only considering the first year? My company has been around almost 20yrs and is impacted. There's no years since founding in any part of the calculation.
Just to clear this up, this change is unrelated to if you've taken the R&D credit. You should take it as it slightly helps offset this change, but regardless the calculation applies to dev salaries and costs without regard to if you've actually taken the R&D credit.
It's built by and around the Laravel community but it's not exclusive to Laravel just like any Laravel programmer is not only a Laravel programmer. They are of course PHP programmers and many (most) also know other back end languages, front end, etc.
Even the jobs up during our soft launch reflect this. You'll see jobs for Rails developers and customer support already listed as well as general PHP developers, non-Laravel specific.