Hah, I like that: the main benefit of monads is turning your functional language back into an imperative one...

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.