I’ve always used parser combinaties in Haskell and I’ve never seen the things you describe. I guess in Haskell one always directly apply the parts to the function you want (ie an AST node constructor).

We are spoiled in so many ways by Haskell!

Parser combinators alone makes monads (or really applicative functors) worth it. But then there are the all the other spectacular things we can do with monads!