Can CI 4 handle a thousand request?

Your question has 2 parts:

Part one, "if CI4 can handle a thousand requests", depends if you mean thousand requests per second, per minute or per day? Seriously, with 1000req/sec your bottleneck will be not CI4, but underlying hardware, its file system, and your database engine. With such load you should design your application appropriately, employ load balancer, caching on different levels (client-side, server-side, database), ensure indexes in DB tables are optimized for queries you run, use latest PHP7.x version with correct webserver config and many more. Raw CI4 performance is just one tiny part of your high-load ready infrastructure.

Part two, "can CI4 compete to laravel in terms of faster" is easier to answer: any framework can compete with any other framework that is using same programming language, world is open for competition and it is welcomed Sariously again, there are several attempts to benchmark different PHP frameworks, most recent one is here: https://kinsta.com/blog/php-benchmarks/

Results were:
- CodeIgniter 4.0-rc.3 PHP 7.4 benchmark results: 333.08 req/sec
- Laravel 6.7.0 PHP 7.4 benchmark results: 394.96 req/sec

So they are close, but even without any business logic implemented pure synthetic tests shows results far beyound your target 1000req/sec. So even with Laravel you will be in troubles when face such load. So brace yourself