He described a problem people use monads to solve, not monads themselves. Haskell people do talk about monadic vs. applicative combinators that are different b

He described a problem people use monads to solve, not monads themselves. Haskell people do talk about monadic vs. applicative combinators that are different by whether you can use the results of a previous step on the next ones. But that doesn't have a direct relation with the actual definition of those. But yes, if you are teaching a programming language that uses monads to someone, you will probably want to explain the problem they solve, not the actual structures. As most things in math, the structures become obvious once you understand the problem.