No, as someone who understands monads (and not thanks to the explanations usually given) the real problem is that most explanations are crap and needlessly complicate the matter. Including every one I've read thus far (well, up to when I made my comment) in this thread.

It's as if they can't lay off Haskell notation and concepts for a moment to give people the overall picture. People, stop mentioning "functors", "monoids", ">>=", "bind" etc in your Monad explanations. Also drop the Haskell function definitions.

Even fmap shouldn't be taken for granted (as something already known) in a Monads explanation. Just describe what it does, giving a simple example. And when talking to Javascript programers use types and names of types that they already know, such as "array", not List. Even such simple terminology distinctions like those matter.

>They see the superficial similarities between Haskell and other languages but fail to grasp the more significant differences: higher-kinded types and type classes.

The whole magic of explaining is to give an idea of the "significant differences" without requiring any foundation beyond what an average blub programmer already has.