Let's say you have the example from the article of wanting a non-empty list, but you don't use the NonEmpty type and instead are just using an ordinary list. As functions get called that require the NonEmpty property, they either have to trust that the data was validated earlier or perform the validation themselves. The data and its type carry no proof that it is, in fact, non-empty.

If you instead parse the data (which includes a validation step) and produce a Maybe NonEmpty, if the result is a Just NonEmpty (vs Nothing) you can pass around the NonEmpty result to all the calls and no more validation ever needs to occur in the code from that point on, and you obviously reject it rather than continue if the result is Nothing. Once you have a NonEmpty result, you have a proof (the type itself) that is carried with it in the rest of the program.

From the article:

    validateNonEmpty :: [a] -> IO ()
    validateNonEmpty (_:_) = pure ()
    validateNonEmpty [] = throwIO $ userError "list cannot be empty"
    
    parseNonEmpty :: [a] -> IO (NonEmpty a)
    parseNonEmpty (x:xs) = pure (x:|xs)
    parseNonEmpty [] = throwIO $ userError "list cannot be empty"