With Haskell Language Server (HLS) there's now great autocompletion and inline error reporting for e.g. VSCode and other editors.
We've recently got dot-notation, so you can type `myRecord.myField` instead of `myField myRecord`, which makes Haskell code feel more familiar when switching from other languages.
With IHP we now even have a Haskell version of Rails/Laravel. It's really a superpower to have Haskell's type system combined with the rapid development approach of Rails :) Check it out here: https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/ (I'm founder of IHP)
Serokell also has a great blog section on people using Haskell in the industry, e.g. recently there was an interview with the CTO of Mercury. https://serokell.io/blog/haskell-in-production
I think if Haskell wants to convince developers to jump ship (and they don't, according to the infamous marketing slogan) there must be a bigger benefit, I don't think better record Syntax cuts it.
And has been doing so for 20 years. But in the meantime, the other language ecosystems improve also, and new programmer expectations pop up.
Other things have not changed much. Editor tooling consists of things that appear for awhile and then fall into unmaintenance. I tried using Emacs but its Haskell mode has improved little in years so now I just use Vim. People say the new Cabal-install is better but the UI and docs are littered with indicators that it’s still beta, and some old functionality has been dropped, so I’m afraid to use it. Meanwhile Stack now appears to be in maintenance mode. People rave about Nix but all it makes me do is scratch my head and wonder how it could possibly do anything that’s worth wading through heaps of conflicting docs and blog posts.
Overall though Haskell does what I need it to do. It kind of reminds me of Unix shells: strange in many ways that haven’t been fixed for decades, but still the best at what they do. Rust gets hype now but it doesn’t seem to be a better high-level language. It’s a better systems-programming language.
Haskell will chug along quietly but with some things backsliding while others improve, I don’t expect much net forward progress.
It is hard to opt out when libraries use them. And I gave it a pretty decent shot but it seems like a big hill to climb. Doable but requires a lot of dedication or a full time job in the stack with peers who can help onboard you.
The last major hurdle I have with the Haskell ecosystem, is the lack of officially supported (and minimally divergent) alternative Preludes.
That doesn’t change the other pragmatic challenges around Haskell, of which there are several.
But then I go back and get my full tool bucket for the big projects.