I was trying to use Aeson, which as noted in this excellent tutorial [1] (which didn’t exist when I first tried it) is “hopelessly magical for people who try to learn it by looking at provided examples, and existing tutorials don’t help that much.“ The rest of the tutorial should give you some idea of why I say that parsing JSON in Haskell is complex, at least if you’re used to doing it in JavaScript.

[1]: https://artyom.me/aeson