Firmly on the side of effects: Roc doesn’t have higher-kinded types, which makes it practically impossible to express monads. It’s covered somewhere in https://www.roc-lang.org/faq.html
You need them to express a type constraint that’s generic for all monads. I might have gone a bit too far saying monads would be impossible without HKTs, but a single Monad type class would be, and you lose a lot of the power of monads if you don’t have that.