After doing a bit of research, I conjecture that the MonadFail instances (e.g. for ReaderT) were added in mtl-2.2.1.
However, this information isn't attached to these instances in the haddocks (e.g. https://hackage.haskell.org/package/mtl-2.2.1/docs/Control-Monad-Reader.html#v:fail), nor is it mentioned in the CHANGELOG (https://hackage.haskell.org/package/mtl-2.2.2/changelog).
Proposal: