I was going to be one of the people who complained about this post's shortcomings, but of course that's because I learned Haskell rather than Swift, and so the implications of monads et al. are a teensy bit different.
This is probably all you need to know in terms of Swift.
If you're talking about the actual mathematical theories, or how other languages see it, this is a gross oversimplification. But since we're talking about just Swift it's fine.
While Type theory in general is fundamental for people who implement languages (and too often we see the result of the lack of knowledge of type theory in the implementation of main stream languages, and no, I'm not talking about PHP here), most developers just want to get an idea of what all that stuff is about. Most developers will never use functors but Monads have interesting applications, like Futures (i.e. Promises).
It's easy to understand with this article that the usual notion of type (int32,char*,...) is just a subset of what types actually are. (T) -> T is also a type. And if most developers can remember that, well, that's a good thing.
I agree, with the caveat that if one is going to mock the Haskell community ("A million words of category theory and Haskell examples to say..."), it would be helpful if you don't summarize it incorrectly ("... Functors contain stuff"). There are plenty of Functors in the Haskell sense that are not immediately obviously containers, such as all functions a -> b, which is actually a very commonly-used one. (Of course one could stretch the definition of "container" to include "function" but, well, would that not constitute engaging in the very academic wankery one is simultaneously trying to mock?) So perhaps it is not so mysterious that it takes a bit longer to explain the Haskell uses of the term.
Haskell is simply more expressive and abstract, and explaining that takes far more time.
Swift lacks that amount of expressiveness. Some people call that level of expressiveness "academic wankery" and some people think it's the best thing ever.
It does sadden me that people think a language is worse or better when it is simply different.
This is probably all you need to know in terms of Swift.
If you're talking about the actual mathematical theories, or how other languages see it, this is a gross oversimplification. But since we're talking about just Swift it's fine.