Haskell is hard - monads in themselves not really.
Honestly do you not even see how naive this idea is that the only thing standing between a subject that literally everyone spends a ton of time on getting good understanding of is a renaming or a catch phrase? Even people who read tons of blogs of “actually it simple just…” end up spending time getting to know it. And every one of those people writing those blogs spent a ton of time on it which is why they are writing blogs about their “eureka moment” that will forever make the subject and instantly learned matter.
There are so many things in programming that are hard to grasp at a deep level, but don't look scary to beginners (who misuse them without realizing). Monads look scary so they take all the blame. I'm not really proposing this, but I guess if monads were called something like "flatmappable", the focus would perhaps shift to the more difficult parts of Haskell: at the root, immutability and purity, and on top of that, the deluge of abstractions and ways to compose them. It wouldn't make Haskell any easier... it would just save the poor monad all the bad rap.