Author here. I agree with your points, and in my article I specifically mention that there are benefits to some of the "hardness" of certain tasks in Elm (type-safety in the case of JSON decoding).

But to claim that JSON decoding in Elm is not significantly more difficult than it is in JavaScript would be misleading. A front end developer that has only written JS will be surprised when he/she cannot just drop in the equivalent of JSON.parse() and get an Elm value out of it. I call it "hard" because there is a bit of a learning curve, and it does require some thought, and quite frankly it takes quite a bit of time if you have a large application like we do.

Moreover, I am not complaining. And I do not think people should be. As I said in the article, the tradeoff is worth it.