This argument holds basically for every potentially lazy function, and I fail to see why comparisons should be special, so this is not really convincing. :-) We have easy ways to make things more strict, but not the other way around.

In any case, it has historically been the case that the reference implementations in the Haskell language/library report define the strictness of the defined functions, too. Otherwise things could be very surprising, in both ways (too lazy, too strict). Furthermore, the report is *very* explicit about the derived instances: https://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/haskellch11.html#x18-18300011.1 And (), Bool, ... are defined via deriving: https://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/haskellch9.html#x16-1710009