That would be a matter for implementors, not new Haskell arrivals:
Unfortunately, renaming Data.Text to e.g. Data.Text.Strict (so that Data.Text.Lazy can be the default) would now probably break too much existing code. It’s another reason to investigate the possibility of merging the two Text modules, using lazy lists of strict Text.
Nice. If there’s a similar way to replace the use of Read, a less-ambitious option (than eradicating String immediately) would be to simply mark String as deprecated, with a view to possibly moving all “stringy” types into libraries:
(yes, even one for type String = [Char]), especially considering just how many of them now exist:
But (again) it would also be nice to have only one Text type to nominate as the successor to String…