"And in the example with the try-catch I would have wrapped it around the loop anyway."

It's very likely that, in reality, you would forget the exception could be thrown until it happened in production.

So the advantages of the Haskell type system and purity guarantees, I think, often come down to the compiler preventing you from making certain errors that don't surface in other languages until you run the program. (Disclaimer: not a Haskell programmer.)