Part of why monads are not interesting to talk about is that they’re generic enough that most explanations are incomplete, and sufficient explanations are boring and unhelpful.

But the biggest reason is that they’re sort of intuitive, plenty examples exist. And then at some point someone tells you that those things are monads, but it’s in the kind of way that social psychologists make up some fancy word for crap we all know about in our gut.

Nobody gives a shit that a list is a monad, people give a shit that it’s a list. Anyone who’s written lisp or node or any nontrivial C program or anything with coroutines or anything with concurrency can and will tell you that, yeah, duh, control flow can be represented by a data structure. A couple more fancy “monad laws” and you have something that looks like other monads, and lists and if expressions and IO meld together. Ok, how unhelpful.