I don't think we disagree in spirit - I didn't mean to imply that it prevents you from, e.g., writing all of your code in the IO monad, just the points you made

I don't think we disagree in spirit - I didn't mean to imply that it prevents you from, e.g., writing all of your code in the IO monad, just the points you made in your last paragraph. So, more that they're a useful tool to help you realize these goals, not something that gets you there on its own. It does let you broaden/specify your definition of "effectful" a bit - modelling event streams with monads gives you FRP (as in your robot example), and I vaguely remember reading in some paper somewhere the suggestion of using monads to separate out unconstrained recursion/non-totality/co-data from total code.