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Monads are a pattern for function chaining.

Most tutorials go off the rails because they confuse types supporting this pattern with "being a monad". For example, arrays in JavaScript support the pattern through the `flatMap()` method, but saying "a JavaScript array is a monad" is misleading because most of what people do with arrays are unrelated to this.

As a pattern it is very general. It strings a sequence of functions together, but doesn't care about the semantics of the functions or the types involved, as long as each function just return the same generic type.

But many explanations take the semantics of how some particular types use the pattern and generalize from that. E.g. list and option types are monads, so monads are explained as containers. Or IO and State uses the pattern to represent side effects, so monads are explains as a way to have side effects in Haskell.

This is what leads to the bizarre metaphors, like monads are boxes, monads are spacesuits, monads are train-tracks etc. Each metaphor matches some uses of monads but breaks down on others.