Why is My Laravel App Randomly Forgetting Sessions and Making laravel debugging a Nightmare After Latest Update?

So, we've got this 'Laravel Quick Fix & Consultation' service, and usually, it's smooth sailing, but lately, our own internal demo app has been acting like a teenager with mood swings.

The main issue: users are getting randomly logged out, like their sessions just vanish into the ether. it's super intermittent, making `laravel debugging` a real headache, and honestly, it's making our own Laravel application support team scratch their heads. No clear pattern, happens on different routes.

Here's a simplified look at what our logs *sometimes* show, or a snippet of our session config for context:

// config/session.php snippet
'driver' => env('SESSION_DRIVER', 'file'),
'lifetime' => env('SESSION_LIFETIME', 120),
'expire_on_close' => false,
'encrypt' => false, // sometimes this causes issues if not handled right
'path' => '/',
'domain' => null, // ensure this is correctly set for subdomains
'secure' => env('SESSION_SECURE_COOKIE', false),
'http_only' => true,
'same_site' => 'lax', // or 'strict'

We've checked environment variables, cache, even restarted the server a few times. what am i missing here? any common pitfalls for random session invalidation?

Thanks in advance!