I really don't like how monads get couched in this way: they're a fundamental concept that you can see everywhere (at least understood by functional programmers

I really don't like how monads get couched in this way: they're a fundamental concept that you can see everywhere (at least understood by functional programmers with Promise.then/Promise.resolve, Array.flatMap/[x], etc.). Railing on how "using Monads is hard" makes no sense because it's a bit like talking about how using, say, Abelian groups are hard when, surprise, you use them every day.