surprisingly, deepseq is not used as much as I thought. http://packdeps.haskellers.com/reverse/deepseq lists a lot of packages, but (after grepping through some of the code) most just define NFData instances and/or use it in tests, but rarely in the „real“ code. For some reason I expected it to be in more widespread use.
I've been using deepseq quite a bit lately, but for the purpose of debugging space leaks. If, when I deepseq a big structure, the space leak goes away, I can then apply it to some subset. After much trial-and-error I can find something which is insufficiently strict. Ideally I can then strictify that one thing and stop using the deepseq. I wish there was a more efficient way to do this. I also use it to explicitly force certain parts of a data structure so they evaluate in parallel, though that part is not actually done yet.