The whole avoid success at all costs looks more like a meme to me than actual strategy. There are functional languages (Clojure(Script), Elm) which made pragmatic decisions about the feature sets and have found commercial success. But with Haskell, it seems a reverse process was followed. It starts with some (questionable?) assumptions like lazy evaluation is good and then builds on top of it. For commercially viable software, the process is generally reverse. You start with specific problems and build a feature set from it.
The best way to understand this academic Vs. pragmatic approach is to look at Golang's relative success vs Haskell. No matter how much PL researcher snobs complain about golang, its creators started from real problems and chose some constraints carefully. The result is its widespread adoption in its niche (networked infrastructure code that can tolerate GC). Such cases are not documented for Haskell or are rare to find.
It is perfectly alright and better to say, look this was a research language to find out how far we can go with certain choices and assumptions. But constant evangelism about how it is elegant etc does not help.