Class Carbon\Carbon not found

Question

I recently added a package to my Laravel 4 site and now anything that uses Eloquent (or at least Eloquent with any reference to date/time) is showing a 500 error that states

Answer 1

Some times specifying prefer-dist prefixed by “--” (aka “bare double dash”) at the end or suffixing at the end of create-project also matters while installing...

The below command was working fine in laravel 5.5 without getting an error

composer create-project laravel/laravel blog  "5.5.*" --prefer-dist

But when I was about to begin installing Laravel 5.6 with this below command

composer create-project laravel/laravel blog --prefer-dist

I used to get

Whoops\Exception\ErrorException : Class 'Carbon\Carbon' not found

After referring to the official Installation Documentation

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel blog

After executing the above command there were no exceptions raised, therefore installation succeeded, thereby generating a base64 hash key