Branding doesn't need to be weird and arbitrary, see Pythons NewType: https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html#typing.NewType

Reading TFA now, Pythons NewType seems to be equal to Haskells newtype. Yes, it's a hack for the type checker to work around existing language semantics and feels unergonomic at times when Parse, Don't Validate needs to fall back to plain validation, but I wouldn't call it neither weird nor arbitrary.