Let's understand a bit more about API authentication with Laravel. Even though Laravel is an MVC framework, we can use the token-based authentication feature. Even Laravel itself has a library called Passport.
Laravel Passport is a library that works with the OAuth2 standard. This pattern determines a way to perform application authentication for a web application (API) through tokens, while JWT focuses on authenticating users through tokens.
Laravel Passport is a much bigger layer of abstraction than simple JWT, and it is primarily designed to be fully fledged and easy to set up and use as an OAuth2 server.
An alternative to this is the use of libraries such as tymon/jwt-auth.
In fact, Laravel Passport uses JWT for authentication, but that's just an implementation detail. tymon/jwt-auth is closer to a simple token-based authentication, though...