Haskell absolutely has waaaay too much cruft. Have you read the 30 page articles recommending which extensions to use? Have you ever seen MTL? Read any documentation written by Edward Kmett?
Modules and libraries are not part of the language
Java,for example, can't have proper generics because at the bytecode level (the "real" Java) they are not supported, it can't have static constructors because it would break inheritance and they had to come up with static blocks, it has no support for static methods with the same signature of an instance method, because the call syntax doesn't differentiate a call to a static method from a call to an instance method, so the compiler can't tell which method is being called, etc. etc.
These are all consequences of the original choices taken 25 years ago when they designed the bytecode and the sintactic sugar over the bytecode, that still live with us today
IMO, the prevalence of libraries like MTL, or with poor documentation, is a consequence of design decisions as well — maybe not of the abstract language, but at least of the primary implementations.
