Are you referring to the fact that Either has a Monad instance? Because you're not *using* it monadically, but purely, so its Monad instance is not relevant. Likewise lists have a Monad instance, but most of the time you don't use it, you treat them as pure values.

(You also can't mix monads; if you're using <- in a do block in IO, it must be working with a value in IO, not merely one in some monad. This is clearer when you learn how do blocks desugar into functions.)