Some would argue that in retrospect strict should have been the default, I sympathize with that view personally somewhat.
But every language that beats Darwin for long enough does so by iterating the stuff that can be “fixed” and developing conventions and tools for the gotchas that can’t (practically) be.
I would love a strict Haskell, but I don't think functional programming would have been the same today. Laziness was the big motivator for keeping the language uncompromisingly pure, and we may not have developed monads and similar without it.
But every language that beats Darwin for long enough does so by iterating the stuff that can be “fixed” and developing conventions and tools for the gotchas that can’t (practically) be.