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These things are monadic:

Functions, continuations, state, IO, parsers, futures, streams, lists, transactions, LINQ, observables.

I can only think of one abstraction more useful - the function.

I didn't say that monads aren't useful; I said that the abstraction is unsatisfactory. The world needs a new clearer concept to use instead of the monad, just as raft can be used instead of paxos.

Monads are literally the simplest/smallest abstraction that makes all these examples compose nicely. It will be hard to come up with something clearer I think.

What is so unsatisfactory about them?

Why would we judge them by that standard? Monads are useful models for plenty of things. That has nothing to do with how many monad tutorials are out there.

> How many Monad explanations need to be written before we admit that the Monad is an unsatisfactory abstraction for practical purposes?

That's really not true, is it? I mean, you only need to look at how monads are used to express results as return types to understand the practical usefulness of monads.