What is Policies in Laravel, and what role does it play in a real application?

What is Policies in Laravel, and what role does it play in a real application? In Laravel, policies should be understood as part of a larger application architecture rather than as an isolated API call. Policies group authorization logic around a model or resource and make CRUD-style permissions easier to organize. A strong understanding includes its purpose, the layer where it belongs, the data or request flow it affects, and the situations where another mechanism may be more appropriate. Practical context: Authorization determines what an authenticated user is permitted to do and can be expressed through gates and policies. The specific focus here is policies: Policies group authorization logic around a model or resource and make CRUD-style permissions easier to organize. This question is designed to test not only terminology, but also how the concept fits into Laravel's request, application, database, security, or deployment workflow.