I actually agree with this much. Explaining monads before explaining a lot of concrete examples of monads is putting the cart before the horse, and is where a lot of these tutorials go wrong (https://m50d.github.io/2013/01/16/generic-contexts is my own effort at taking the opposite approach). But calling something a functor when it isn't is extremely unhelpful; the whole point of using a special-purpose term like functor is to be very precise about what it is and isn't, and to avoid intuitions that would be misleading.