But we didn't start with Either, which IMO is an incredibly important distinction.
Bolting things like this onto the language after the fact isn't the same as having first class support by default (like in say, Haskell)
It's taking the logical disjunction operator, `||` in many languages, and sticking it in a data structure. You can now pass it around like a normal JS value and combine it with other such values.
The benefit of this over exceptions is that for unexceptional situations you don't end up throwing away the context of your computation if something takes the "bad path." Instead of jumping to the exception handler and losing all of your data your program can handle the situation at the site of the error where it has the most context to solve the issue.
TFA wasn't advocating abandoning try/catch -- it was suggesting that for non-exceptional cases it will make your code cleaner.
The for loop is indeed a magic keyword, though it's less surprising/magic than try/catch; most of what for does could be done by a plain old function.
> Meanwhile, I'd be willing to bet that not even 10% of programmers could actually explain what a monad is.
Don't try to generalize prematurely. Considering Either on its own, it's simpler than try/catch and can replace their use cases. If you'd started with Either, try/catch would seem like the overcomplicated solution in search of a problem that it is.