I've found out that Laravel form requests automatically escape the "<" (Less-than sign), but only in the case when there is a character coming afterward (excluding whitespace).
Example successful input (Input is: foo < bar)
"comments" => "foo < bar"
Example failed input (Input is: foo < bar \r\n bar <foo)
"comments" => """
foo < bar\r\n
bar
"""
It automatically trims the string, right after the following character of the less-than sign.
Dumping directly the $_POST variable shows all the data correctly, however, the data gets escaped and is not possible to be accessed within the request.