“Laziness allows you to think of data structures like control structures. Lists, along with the usual higher order functions, turn into essentially reified loops which can be transformed all at once.

There is a place for strictness, but it’s actually rather small compared to the cases when laziness wins out. You want strictness when reducing large data structures into small ones in a way which uses all of the large structure (i.e. not a search). In all other cases, laziness is actually preferable or equivalent to strictness in terms of performance.