Elm is particularly easy to pick up for people coming from Haskell. Maybe not in 15 seconds, but 15 minutes is a totally reasonable estimate.
The author can without doubt write a large project in Elm. His complaints were about missing the conveniences of abstraction Haskell-like languages provide, and he is more than qualified to talk about it.
Decomposing records into tuples of comparables has probably crossed his mind :)
Well, all right. In general I would say that is not true even for languages that are close, but there are exceptions and I suppose I can take your word for it.
It would be interesting to compare with the opinion/experience of someone who didn't know Haskell, well, right? (Though in that case perhaps the learning curve is too steep, maybe Elm isn't meant for that.)
If you're coming from Haskell, you'll see Elm as a dumbed down, stripped version of Haskell, which will trigger in you the feelings it triggered in the OP.