[StopDisinfo910]

The truth is that it’s not a very useful abstraction in and of itself.

You can build some generic tooling on top of monads and applicatives and that tooling is useful and can give familiarity to new data structures but objectively that’s true mostly because monads are so common in Haskell. Thinking monads are common for this reason is reversing cause and consequence.

So why are monads so prevalent in Haskell, you will ask. Because there is sugar to make their use easy. And why is there sugar? Because I/O uses a monadic interface. That was Haskell new idea. You can easily keep track of side effects with the type system if you use a monadic interface and some sugar.