[tathougies]

Perhaps you're reading the wrong documentation. I've personally never found it that way. Most documentation on hackage is very concrete, and for the ones that aren't (i.e., lens), there are plenty of tutorials.

I've definitely encountered the abstraction-for-the-sake-of-abstraction types, but those are mainly academics, in my experience.

I mean, monads are (for some reason or the other) the killer feature of Haskell abstraction, and their use case is extremely concrete. map, fold, etc are also motivated by very concrete desires.

Even more advanced concepts, like zippers, generics, lenses, ftpe, etc are all motivated by extremely concrete problems.