At some point var_dump in Postman started printing HTML instead of json and made debugging experience worse. I used php artisan serve and suspected that my CLI php is using xdebug. This advice I found helpful.
sudo phpdismod -s cli xdebug – to disable xdebug
sudo phpenmod -s cli xdebug – to enable xdebug
This is how you can disable and enable xdebug from command line. After this that <pre> thing should go away from Postman responses.