I'm genuinely curious: is this because Haskell is generally hard to learn[] or because of some inherent property of Haskell that makes type classes unnecessary

I'm genuinely curious: is this because Haskell is generally hard to learn[] or because of some inherent property of Haskell that makes type classes unnecessary when you have first class functions? [] This statement is based purely on my own experience. I find the Haskell documentation a bit unfriendly with its "academic" style. The content is great, but the form makes it a bit hard to assimilate. Monads were especially painful.