Indeed, but arguably both can sound strange to an outsider.
Much of the minimal elegance of Haskell relies on it being able to express logic while abstracting away details. If the goal was to get the syntax to look more like the one of JS/TS, there could have been a way to write it similarly to your example - and even simpler. But the point was - show how the use of a monoid abstracts all that - allowing one to simply use the already defined operations of the monoid.
At the time the exaples were written, they were indeed intended for a Haskell crowd, but good point going forward. Thank you.