I disagree, although it's possible I only disagree with how you've phrased it. Monadic interfaces in the context of non-deterministic effects are a consolation

I disagree, although it's possible I only disagree with how you've phrased it. Monadic interfaces in the context of non-deterministic effects are a consolation prize. They represent a way to combine effectful code, but ideally your code would have almost no effects at all. As far as I can tell, the idealized version of this talk is a batch interface: one effect to grab all the data you need, transform the data, and then one effect to "flush" the transformed data (where flush could mean to persist the data in a database, send it out as commands to control a robot, etc). Tracking side effects in your types (maybe what you were going for?) is helpful for measuring to what degree your code fails to adhere to this idealized model. If most of your code has an effect type, that's probably a sign to refactor. It also keeps you honest as to the infectious nature of effectful code by propagating the type as necessary.