Honestly, I'm not much concerned with beginner friendliness. As long as there are enough users to maintain and improve its ecosystem, it will stay a good language. The moto of "avoid success at all costs" was correct, and if beginner friendliness comes at the expense of expert usefulness, I'll be glad the second is chosen.

That said, none of that applies to those gotchas. They are clear problems with the language. None of them are obvious, but all of them are widely discussed so you will see them early when learning the language. Learning the gotchas of an ecosystem is a central part of learning any tool on informatics, and as gotchas go, one of the strong points of Haskell is that there are very little of them.

You are making a very common complaint, that comes from ignoring the problems of the tools you know while making a fuzz over anything you find on the new one. It's almost certain that whatever languages you are used to, they have a much larger pile of gotchas than Haskell (because Haskell has an atypical small number of them), but that doesn't stop them from being useful.