"Now, maybe something about Haskell Enlightenment obviates this case entirely in a way I'm not seeing."
Many times the answer is that with a different structure you don't need deep mutation to be a critical part of your program. After all, "deep mutation" isn't considered a great idea in object-oriented languages either, where it constitutes a violation of the Law of Demeter [1], either in letter or in spirit (i.e., creating a chain of methods to set some deep value may in letter follow the Law but can still be a violation in principle).
But if you do need it, Haskell does have a rather nifty mechanism for mutation patterns to be first-class elements themselves through "lenses", which capture as a first-class value some access pattern and mutation pattern on a given value. And while one of its original purposes is to allow Haskell like
value %~ property1 ^. property2 =. newValue
such that in a monadic context that will pretty much do what you'd expect as an imperative programmer, it also means (property1 ^. property2) is itself a value that can be used and passed around like any other, and allows for things like creating generic functions that take "a thing, and a thing that will extract a Name from that thing, and will return a new copy of the original thing with the name all uppercase" or something like that. And there's a whole bunch of other ways to make that stuff sing and dance too, if you're in the mood.
You can even do really melty stuff like have a lens that will expand an int into its bits, allow you to manipulate those bits as if you had an array of bool, and then will re-pack them into the int for you. Lenses can take any arbitrary slice out of an object as long as you can express the extraction and the creation of a new object putting the stuff back, and then they can be composed together as-needed. It can be powerful, but it can get pretty brain-melty too.
Let me add that lenses are not just a Haskell thing. It's a simple (and beautiful IMHO) concept from functional programming that can be introduced in many languages. Also, you can have lenses without the cryptic operators.
The cryptic operators are by far the worst thing about learning the basics of Haskell.
The language is already hard to learn because of all the wonderful and mindblowing concepts but the syntax is super frustrating and takes the difficulty to another level.
Many times the answer is that with a different structure you don't need deep mutation to be a critical part of your program. After all, "deep mutation" isn't considered a great idea in object-oriented languages either, where it constitutes a violation of the Law of Demeter [1], either in letter or in spirit (i.e., creating a chain of methods to set some deep value may in letter follow the Law but can still be a violation in principle).
But if you do need it, Haskell does have a rather nifty mechanism for mutation patterns to be first-class elements themselves through "lenses", which capture as a first-class value some access pattern and mutation pattern on a given value. And while one of its original purposes is to allow Haskell like
such that in a monadic context that will pretty much do what you'd expect as an imperative programmer, it also means (property1 ^. property2) is itself a value that can be used and passed around like any other, and allows for things like creating generic functions that take "a thing, and a thing that will extract a Name from that thing, and will return a new copy of the original thing with the name all uppercase" or something like that. And there's a whole bunch of other ways to make that stuff sing and dance too, if you're in the mood.You can even do really melty stuff like have a lens that will expand an int into its bits, allow you to manipulate those bits as if you had an array of bool, and then will re-pack them into the int for you. Lenses can take any arbitrary slice out of an object as long as you can express the extraction and the creation of a new object putting the stuff back, and then they can be composed together as-needed. It can be powerful, but it can get pretty brain-melty too.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Demeter