On his site Brendt has shared some of his thoughts about why he sees the service locator design pattern as an anti-pattern and harmful to your overall application.

As a Laravel developer, I'm confronted daily with the service locator pattern. Every facade call and several helper functions are built upon it.

[...] During a discussion with my colleagues, I found it difficult to put into words what exactly is wrong with grabbing things out of the container - a service locator - so I decided to write my thoughts down, with an example. [...] I want to highlight three problems with this approach, directly caused by the use of a service locator.

He goes through a list of where he sees the use of the service locator functionality causing problems including:

• getting runtime instead of compile-time errors
• obfuscation of actual functionality
• increased cognitive load

He ends the post with a quick suggestion on how to solve the issue: use actual dependency injection instead of "magic" locators.