If by controversial, you mean wrong we are in agreement. Modules are both conceptually simpler and easier to use in practice. They also produce far better error messages.
I personally find Ocaml tooling far better than Haskell. The debugger is a lot nicer. The compiler is considerably faster, doesn’t rely as much on extension and generally gives better error messages. VSCode integration does everything I want and is easy to install.
For what it’s worth you are the first person I meet complaining about syntax error. What people complain about are type checking errors which are indeed hard to understand sometimes. Syntax errors are caught well by the parser which tells you exactly where they are. I don’t really understand what you are complaining about.