I don't think it's "moving the goalposts" when you demand that you can understand, at least to a first-order approximation, what the code that you write is doin

I don't think it's "moving the goalposts" when you demand that you can understand, at least to a first-order approximation, what the code that you write is doing. Yes, you could just treat IO as a black box and memorize a bunch of weird syntax rules, but you're going to have a hard time very quickly, especially when you change something and the compiler throws errors at you. FWIW, I think that monads are a powerful abstraction, but they're certainly not incredibly natural and Haskell basically just throws them at you from day 1.