Author here. Having written a lot of Haskell, I don't find lazy evaluation to be an issue nearly as often as it is a benefit. Yes, it can be difficult to reason about at times, but more often it ends up leading to simpler code. I would say that if you're consistently highly concerned with evaluation order, then yes, Haskell might not be the language for you.

But I would also say that you shouldn't be concerned with evaluation order when writing Haskell, in the same way you usually shouldn't be concerned with what the query optimizer is doing when writing SQL.

> because it's a language with strict evaluation

But that is not the only reason. Haskell does much more aggressive optimisations than Java (and Scala, OCaml, F#). A large part of Haskell's space-usage reasoning issues come from the combination of lazy evaluation and these aggressive optimisations. Java and Scala code can contain plenty of deferred evaluation too, for example iterators, but the compilers simply don't do (and cannot do) such aggressive optimisations. Of course, this also means that much pure functional Scala/Java code can be poorly performing.