Listing sequential actions one after the other is so intuitive you see it everywhere. Take baking recipes as one example. Or assembly code. Or poems.
Procedural programming languages let you use the same intuition for sequencing actions you've been using since you were carving hieroglyphics into obelisks.
When a Haskeller says, "Monads are great! They let you chain effectful actions together!" it can take a very long time to understand they actually mean exactly what they're saying — the usual intuition is that sequencing actions can't possibly be a real problem, so you go round and round in circles trying to understand what "effectful" means, what "action" means, and how these oh-so-important "laws" have anything to do with it.
A programmable semicolon cuts right to the truth: yes, really, functional programming had to work hard to solve *that* problem.
I can understand why that viewpoint might be long-forgotten by those who were involved in the effort to solve it. :) And I appreciate that it was solved in such a general way that it can be applied to so many seemingly unrelated things! That's the beauty of mathematics!