I mean at it's most basic "monads" are -a data type with some hidden information -a lot of functions that can ignore that hidden information -some functions

I mean at it's most basic "monads" are -a data type with some hidden information -a lot of functions that can ignore that hidden information -some functions that can act (switch|add|mutate|signal|sequence) on that hidden information people seem to think talking about flatMap somehow makes this intuitive despite the tautological issue of flatMap only making sense if you already know what's going on.