As a senior engineers writing Haskell professionally for a number of years, I’ve found it much simpler to teach about Monads after having taught about Functors and Applicatives first, because there’s a very natural, intuitive progression, and because most people already have an intuitive grasp of Functors because map is cribbed so commonly in other programming languages.

I agree! I just wanted to explain what Monads are, standalone, and avoid introducing any other concepts.