For me at least, the mathematics line-noise is a bigger issue, and it made more sense once I ignored it. As a programming construct, monads seem quite understandable to me, even clever. But many of the explanations, especially earlier ones, started out with a type-theoretic explanation with links to category theory...

In particular, I was under the misimpression for years, because of it being presented that way, that monads were essentially of interest only for people who were hung up on type-checking: that they were a solution to how to make the type-checking go through on a certain class of problems, by lifting an underlying type into the Monadic type and getting it back out again. As someone who mainly uses dynamically typed languages, this didn't seem of interest, since in Lisp, I don't care if the type-checking goes through or not. It was probably years later that I figured out they had some non-type-related programming benefit.