Laziness helps a lot with composition, when designing an interface you can have functions with arguments that won't be used by every implementation but have no performance overhead.

Although, most of the time laziness is only useful at a single level, and that kind of laziness can be easily done in languages like C++ with a much lower overhead.

It's a bit sad that GHC has so many advanced code optimization methods but performance is still lacking.

Yes, you can write high-performance Haskell but it requires expertise or huge amount of profiling and time.

On the other hand, you can easily write faster (speed-wise) prototypes in C++ and get superior performance almost all the time.

List of ways to write performant Haskell: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10209798