> I've been trying for the last 3 days to wrap my work style around cabal/stack...

You have me puzzled! You can totally ignore/skip cabal and just use

- to create project dir with stack.yaml

    stack new myproject simple

- to ensure all dependencies and a ghc for that stack.yaml are present

    stack setup

- to rebuild any changes

    stack make

- to live-code in your project

    stack repl

- to run interpreted any one of your mains:

    stack runghc some/tool.hs

- to grab 3rd-party dependencies for the project:

    stack install some-external-lib

Pretty similar to most other modern languages' "canonical" build/run/package-management tooling really.

> Ideally, I'd be able to write Haskell that compiles into concise, trimmed down, readable javascript bundles, (as you can compile OCaml with bucklescript). But I don't think it's really possible right now. Once upon a time I successfully managed to get ghcjs to compile code using a library I was interested in. It spit out a 1 MB bundle, without even doing much of anything.

Well. For JavaScript from Haskell, other than GHCJS that "compiles the whole runtime system" to multi-MB packages, there's more lightweight options (outside of PureScript/Elm), namely: Fay and Haste. Fear not, a new from-scratch transpiler is also next on my agenda however! ;) that's because Fay parses Haskell to transpile, but I definitely want to transpile from the highly optimized and richly annotated-with-compilation-hints "STG" IR. Not sure how Haste does it, but I'd rather have full control over the JS I emit over the coming half-decade anyway and it's certainly a bit dated (ES 6+ can be emitted so much more "compactly" than legacy JS!)

That being said, from what you're saying I think you're better served with ReasonML or PureScript as these projects seem to already have matured somewhat yet also not-yet-stale =)