I wish more tutorials started with "Parser combinators is a neat and tidy way to structure a recursive descent parser" because I 100% agree. Mostly, my disagree

I wish more tutorials started with "Parser combinators is a neat and tidy way to structure a recursive descent parser" because I 100% agree. Mostly, my disagreements are how parser combinators presented and taught, obscuring the core ideas with a focus on language features and trivialities. To me, the monad/applicate stuff is a red herring. It's mostly used to simulate imperative sequencing. e.g. the Haskell code `Person <$> parseName <*> parseAddress` would be `return Person { parseName(), parseAddress() };` in C. There's a few tricks but it's not crucial to the parser combinator idea and doesn't help readability.