Yes, it is a strawman. Strictness annotations are not unidiomatic any more than using laziness is in ocaml. The ocaml code is effectively using unsafePerformIO all over, ocaml doesn't offer the safety you are complaining that the haskell example gives up. And both of your invalid complaints are completely irrelevant to the question at hand.

The question was about difficulty, not a subjective idea of what idiomatic code looks like. Are you seriously claiming that the average haskell example there is more difficult to write than the average ocaml example? If so, just say that. Trying to redirect the discussion back to your subjective preferences is not productive.