You get the same with e.g. tokio::spawn, which runs the future concurrently and returns something that you can await and get the future's output. Or you can forget that something and the future will still run to completion.
Directly awaiting a future gives you more control, in a sense, as you can defer things until they're actually needed.
Directly awaiting a future gives you more control, in a sense, as you can defer things until they're actually needed.