Regarding your latter point, I don't think monads are even that abstract. "Monad" just happens to be something out of category theory so it has a mathematical w

Regarding your latter point, I don't think monads are even that abstract. "Monad" just happens to be something out of category theory so it has a mathematical weird-sounding name that you MIGHT guess has something to do with monoids -- if you know what monoids are -- so people think it has to be something complicated when in practice it's just a nice unified interface for glue code.