Wow this is great! Fixing Haskell's arcane record system would be a huge step towards more mainstream adoption. It was certainly my largest pain point with the language over years of use in production.
I would say in my 5 years of production Haskell, I've seen that sort of thing deployed in production _maybe_ once, and I've run into it during development once or twice.
One time it was in integration testing, and a simple heap profile made it clear it was in a library dependency. And a quick look at the library source was enough to diagnose it. It was like an hour or two tops from "we have a space leak somewhere" to "here's a PR to a third-party library fixing the leak."
A bit of a problem when you first start using Haskell seriously is that the IO mechanisms built into the prelude are very slow once you get to even only a few MiB.
That's easily remedied by switching to eg ByteStrings, but it's still a bit annoying that what the language presents as the 'default' is such a toy implementation.