The Monad tutorial fallacy is an in-joke in the Haskell community nowadays, born out of what you observed: when people feel like they understand monads, they ar

The Monad tutorial fallacy is an in-joke in the Haskell community nowadays, born out of what you observed: when people feel like they understand monads, they are so happy about it that they write a bad tutorial about it. My advice: Monad is a typeclass, and typeclasses unify things that act alike. Learn Monad instances (List, Maybe, State, ...) separately without worrying about how they are "monadic". After some time you will develop an intuition for what do, <-, return, >>= etc. have in common. And that's what Monad is.