Whether this is the best thing since sliced bread or not, is left as an exercise to the reader.
IMO it's because option is a monad, list is a monad, io is a monad, async is a monad, try-except is a monad, why invent different magic syntax and semantics for all of them when there's a perfectly good abstraction that covers the lot, and that lets you write functions that are agnostic to which particular monad they're in to boot.
Nah, I don't even use the syntax much any more. The main benefit is the huge library ecosystem that works generically with any monad, so that if you want to e.g. traverse over a datastructure with your effectful action you can just use cataM or whatnot from recursion-schemes instead of writing it yourself, if you want to compose pipelines of them you just use Conduit, etc.