You still don't need monads for any of this. Monads give you an ad-hoc polymorphic way of doing monadic actions.

Short circuiting on `Either` is a specific case of this. You can define your own EitherBind in any language.

    eitherBind :: Either e a -> (a -> Either e b) -> Either e b
    eitherBind (Left e) _ = Left e
    eitherBind (Right a) f = f a

Now you can bind over Either to your heart's content without needing an encoding of Monads in your language.

That's merely syntax sugar. Haskell doesn't even have this sugar and so in a monad you have to bind explicitly, and it's fine. It's not a pyramid of doom.

`?` and `let ... else` both partially address this, yeah.