This is simply untrue. You can do IO without understanding what a monad is, simply taking it as "there is this keyword and this syntax I need to use". No Haske

This is simply untrue. You can do IO without understanding what a monad is, simply taking it as "there is this keyword and this syntax I need to use". No Haskell tutorials that I know of take long to reach "hello world", which is in fact a shorter program in Haskell than in some mainstream programming languages.