That's a good point, and I think you've hit one of the main issues why we're still stuck with old, unsafe languages.

There is the saying that once you got a Haskell program to compile, it usually just works, and I personally found it to be true a lot. But getting it through the compiler can indeed be much more of a journey than in, say, C. And I realize that the work you have to put in to just even being able to run something can be discouraging, maybe going against a natural (or maybe just common) affinity towards tight, iterative "change-compile-try" approaches.

Still, in cases where it really matters, i.e. system software or common, but often mission-critical software like sqlite, maybe it's worth taking the jump?

I would jump with joy if sqlite3 was rewritten in Haskell, OCaml or Rust. They can bring so much to the table in terms of safety and less development surprises.