<p>Laminar fibre-reinforced polymer composites have become essential engineering materials across aerospace, automotive, energy, and structural applications due to their high specific strength, durability, and design flexibility. Among available manufacturing routes, compression molding is widely used for high-rate production of such composites, offering advantages in material efficiency and near-net-shape fabrication; however, despite its industrial maturity, the process remains largely governed by empirical, open-loop control strategies, with limited in-situ visibility of evolving material states within closed molds, which leads to variability in consolidation quality, defect formation, extended cycle times, and increased energy consumption, particularly for complex laminate architectures. This review examines the role of optical, photonic, and laser-based technologies in enabling real-time monitoring and control of compression molding processes, where fundamental light-matter interaction principles underlying infrared thermography, spectroscopic sensing, interferometry, and fiber-optic techniques are analyzed with respect to their ability to non-intrusively access key state variables including temperature distribution, degree of cure, deformation, and strain under industrial processing conditions, while laser-based energy delivery is evaluated as a controllable and spatially selective actuation mechanism capable of directly influencing resin rheology, curing kinetics, and consolidation behavior. The synthesis of the reviewed literature demonstrates that optical signals provide physically grounded, high-resolution observables of internal process states that are inaccessible to conventional contact-based sensors, thereby enabling real-time estimation of thermochemical and mechanical evolution within the laminate, and that integrating photonic sensing with laser-based actuation within a closed-loop control architecture enables dynamic regulation of heat transfer, cure progression, and consolidation pressure in response to evolving material conditions, systematically reducing process uncertainty, mitigating defect formation mechanisms such as porosity and uneven curing, and enabling significant reductions in cycle time and energy consumption compared to conventional open-loop processing. The findings of this study provide a comprehensive understanding of how photonic technologies can transform compression moulding from a conservative, empirically driven process into an intelligent, state-aware manufacturing system, thereby supporting improved process robustness, scalability, and industrial deployment of high-performance composite structures across demanding engineering applications.</p>