Though I have only skimmed the book, this strikes me as an unfair characterization. For example, this case study discusses laziness extensively: <https://haskell.foundation/hs-opt-handbook.github.io/src/Cas...>
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about understanding laziness, such that you don't ever write code that's as bad as the starting point there. Treat space use as a correctness property, and make use of documented space invariants to show what you intended. When you do all of this properly, space use becomes a very tractable local property. And sure, some bugs will slip in - but you probably will find them with much less work than the writeup in the section you linked to.
So I would argue that the real message of that chapter is demonstrating, step-by-step the methods used to find the memory leaks: info-table profiling and biographical/retainer profiling and ticky-ticky profiling.