Next week I have to start an update of a Laravel API written with version 7 to version 11. I'm thinking of creating a new project then porting over the code then updating what's needed. Think it might be the less painful action.

What say you fellow Laravel Devs? Is there a better approach I'm missing?

I personally will do the same approach. However at work we used laravelshift.com

to do the heavy lifting (core, dependencies, syntax, break changes, etc) and it worked out really well. Now I just need to rewrite old code to the new fashion.