Do not agree! Monads were always this vague weird thing until I started using IO heavily. Once I was comfortable with IO, applying the abstraction to other things was obvious. I've also helped some other people learn Haskell, and being able to just explain how IO works is much easier than trying to explain the Monad abstraction.
Yes, it's easier to explain a specific concrete example rather than an abstract concept. You don't study literature learning about iambic pentameter and then ending your studies; you also read Shakespeare to see how it's applied in real life. But, you also don't learn to read by starting with Shakespeare. You start with something simpler. The IO abstraction is deep and the implementation messy. So start with State or Writer or something, and go from there.
Sure, but IO gives you answers to the main questions that new people have. How do I write hello world? How do read a line from standard input? How can you DO things in a language without side effects? You can't even write programs without IO, and it's really not confusing.
On the other hand, I think avoiding do-syntax makes sense at first.
