This comment proves my point about how "all the Haskell" hinders mainstream adoption of a thing. It's very easy for folks to miss the point of the thing!

Lenses and more generally optics are a lot more powerful than just dot-accessors. They are closer in spirit to XPath or jq, except that they are general enough to work on most data structures, not just XML or Json.

It doesn't. "All the haskell" is your protective decoy against "it's not that useful when you're not chained to the wall". Show me a lens with a bunch of other fp tricks and I'll write dumb inline code for it that does that same thing, but without twisting anyones brain or trying to not miss its thin point.