Out of curiosity / frustration, made a new laravel copy,

• php artisan make:model Artist -m

makes a migration with the following:

public function up()
    {
        Schema::create('artists', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->increments('id');
            $table->timestamps();
        });
    }

Since it automagically ( :-( ) renames model Artist to artists, i can imagine someplace in the code where this happens as well with my inserts, even though i renamed the migration files... what is my next step, where can i read a bit more about this?

It doesn't rename anything. If you don't set the $table property on the model it will use the plural form of the class name for the table name of the model.

This is in the eloquent docs.