[djipko]

He actually does go into that in the "Some side notes" part. He recommends calling it a monad only when you actually use the monadic interface:

“I have to directly use the result of one IO action in order to decide which IO action should happen next”: Yes, this is a use case for IO’s monadic interface."

Then yes - you need the do-notation.

For simple sequencing he recommends to use it's Applicative instance.

Your overall point is correct though - choosing to avoid the do notation in Haskell will likely limit your ability to read and understand a lot of code just because monads are so commonplace in Haskell.