Part of why monads are not interesting to talk about is that they’re generic enough that most explanations are incomplete, and sufficient explanations are boring and unhelpful.
But the biggest reason is that they’re sort of intuitive, plenty examples exist. And then at some point someone tells you that those things are monads, but it’s in the kind of way that social psychologists make up some fancy word for crap we all know about in our gut.
Nobody gives a shit that a list is a monad, people give a shit that it’s a list. Anyone who’s written lisp or node or any nontrivial C program or anything with coroutines or anything with concurrency can and will tell you that, yeah, duh, control flow can be represented by a data structure. A couple more fancy “monad laws” and you have something that looks like other monads, and lists and if expressions and IO meld together. Ok, how unhelpful.
The fact that they are so generic is what makes people misunderstand them: They focus on 1 or 2 examples, without seeing that the same concept works in all kinds of other use cases.
People realize a list can be a monad, and they they imagine option and set are also monads. But then you have to tell them that the same applies to Future, and Either. That you can have a resource monad that closes resources.
This is when the fact that something is a monad starts to matter, because of generic concepts for transformers. Every language that has promises and lists will give you a way to turn a List[Promise[T]] into Promise[List[T]], written ad-hoc, but it doesn't have to be quite so ad-hoc. It's when you are stacking 3 or 4 different properties together that the abstract concepts matter. The lack of the abstraction is what makes some language have trouble doing more than just a little bit of functional programming, as going deeper becomes unmanageable without some help.
The helpful part is the ability to abstract over arbitrary monads. That's the thing that makes it worth identifying that it's a known and well-studied pattern.
But if people understood monads they wouldn't be bending over backwards to shoehorn specific syntactic sugar just for error handling.