For those motivated to make this happen, you should definitely contribute to the efforts to split base as discussed in: Pre-Pre-HFTP: Decoupling base and GHC. I expect @Ericson2314 would love your help in getting the ball rolling!
Although my suggestions are partial fixes (e.g. don’t account for dev flags), they solve a vast majority of the problems people have. Given the work involved in the full fix (which will take 1-2 _years), finding interim solutions is much more productive imo. We also might find that the small and easy fixes are enough to reduce the problem enough to not warrant the larger breaking changes.