The thing that makes monads difficult is laziness and the anti math circle jerk.
You start from a functor which is a data type that admits a map operation.
Then you add of, or pure, to make an applicative functor, and then you add flatmap to make a monad.
It's odd, the stereotype of software developers is a know-it-all attitude, but start talking about types and you get excuses that boil down to 'I'm incapable of learning to understand the thing you learned to understand'.
> The thing that makes monads difficult is laziness and the anti math circle jerk.
That's quite a hateful way to describe lack of knowledge.
There are some prerequisites that make it easier to understand monads, and a lot of programmers don't even know those. That can make learning monads difficult right off the bat.
Lack of knowledge is not the problem at all. Anti-intellectualism is.
You can try to blame lack of knowledge on anything you want, but at the end of the day Hacker News is for intellectual curiosity and even HN readers don't all know what monads are.
No there's no complexity behind monads except laziness and anti math circle jerk.
It's really basic concepts, much easier than the analysis you do in high school.
But people would rather sit through monad as boxes or burritos cringe tutorials.
Your math explanation starts with a math concept that the vast, vast, vast majority of people will have never even heard of, even in math-adjacent fields. It's not anti-math reasoning. It's a lack of self-awareness that your background is very math heavy, which makes that particular explanation make sense to you. I've gone my entire schooling, as a student who was always one of the few who were "good at math", all the the way through my CS education, without ever having heard of a functor until I came across the Haskell monad explanation meme.
Your next step could be to blame the school systems if you want, but that doesn't help the situation at hand.