I have been working on an application for a while now, and somehow one morning I noticed the application was no longer reading the Google recaptcha key from the .env file thus preventing me from gaining access to the system.
I thought I had tampered with my code somewhere, I looked back at the recent changes I made and none of them were related to the login aspect of the app.

Here is how I fixed it (I'm putting this out to help other developers as well as an easy access to my solution should I ever run into this kind of error again).

I initially ran the following commands but none of them fixed the issue.

php artisan optimize:clear
php artisan route:clear

To fix the issue, I simply had to clear the configuration cache by running the following command:

php artisan config:clear

and that was it, my application was reading the environment variables from the .env file.

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