Insofar as everything is related to monads, yes ;) In fact you don't need to use monads at all here. I've used this pattern on merely applicative non-monadic i

Insofar as everything is related to monads, yes ;) In fact you don't need to use monads at all here. I've used this pattern on merely applicative non-monadic initial algebras before; in fact, the article's "arithmetic expressions" example isn't what I would call "monadic", because it doesn't readily admit Bind as currently phrased. Worse, the "writeSmallOddToFile" example isn't even generic at all, so I don't think there's a reasonable sense in which it could even be said to be functorial.