Ok, I just want people to not think there are no Haskell jobs out there. The only reason not to be able to get one is if you don't want move and can't find something remote (although there are a few remote jobs around). There are otherwise plenty of Haskell jobs for those that are looking and sometimes in unusual places such as Alaska!
It's useful if it's a monad (and functor) because then you have tools to avoid this check until the end of a series of possibly failing functions. It's only really useful with these tools though.
By itself you might as well use nulls or throw errors although you could argue that it's clearer having a maybe or an either.
What libraries are missing? The only issue I've had with libraries are that some client libraries are wrappers over C libraries and this makes static linking difficult (or seemingly impossible on a Mac)
A few years ago there was a lack of libraries in some areas but that's not the case these days.
"for no good reason"? It come from the ML family of languages, that's the reason, is it not as good a reason as why Java has it's syntax? It's quite easy to read once you get used to it, no more difficult than the languages you mention.
Saying a particular paradigm is simply wrong seems like a very closed minded way of looking at things.
It's a lot easier to take care of than zookeeper for one thing. Also Consul is getting pretty close to industry standard these days for newer businesses.