Firstly, thank you for taking the time to read my article and provide some feedback.

I think you are right. Monads aren't the easiest subject to master and my original article needed some corrections.

I didn't set out to write a piece inferring that monads are bad or supporting Ivan's thesis to be honest but any disclaimers I put in there stating this got a bit lost because the original article was a bit mixed in it's messaging. I don't think I was arguing that monadic libraries like Cats shouldn't be used in Clojure as I described it as excellent (that's more Ivan's opinion I guess).

My original intention was to explain some functional programming terms around Monads that can be a bit abstract at times and to explain some of the benefits the Maybe monad from Cats provides. Along the way I also picked up some ideas from Rich Hickey that the Maybe Monad isn't such a good idea for managing optionality in Clojure. However I may have erred in some of the metaphors used, been a bit clumsy with my words and not clarified that the article is really about the Maybe Monad in a specific context.

Hopefully I've addressed most of the concerns you had upon first reading the article, but if not let me know and I'll revisit it!