Agreed, and I think only someone who has not used much Haskell and has only really used the IO monad would say that monads are used mostly for embedding imperat

Agreed, and I think only someone who has not used much Haskell and has only really used the IO monad would say that monads are used mostly for embedding imperative programs. It also depends how you define an imperative program, but most monads are entirely pure and don't deal with sequencing or anything.