Yes, async is effectively a much harder version of Rust, and it's regrettable how it's been shoved down the throats of everyone, while only 1% of projects using it really need it. Hover, async is also amazing in these 1% of cases when it's useful.
If you have a service that handles massive amounts of network calls at the core (think linkerd, nginx, etc.), or you want to have a massive amount of lightweight tasks in your game, or working on an embedded software where you want cooperative concurrency, async Rust is an amazing super-power.
Most system/application level things is not going to need async IO. Your REST app is going to be perfectly fine with a threadpool. Even when you do need async, you probably want to use it in a relatively small part of your software (network), while doing most of the things in threads, using channels to pass work around between async/blocking IO parts (aka hybrid model).
Rust community just mindlessly over-did using async literally everywhere, to the point where the blocking IO Rust (the actually better UX one) became a second class citizen in the ecosystem.
Especially visible with web frameworks where there is N well designed async web frameworks (Axum, Wrap, etc.) and if you want a blocking one you get:
tiny_http, absolute bare bones but very well done
rouille - more wholesome, on top of tiny_http, but APIs feel very meh comparing to e.g. Axum
astra - very interesting but immature, and rather barebones
If you have a service that handles massive amounts of network calls at the core (think linkerd, nginx, etc.), or you want to have a massive amount of lightweight tasks in your game, or working on an embedded software where you want cooperative concurrency, async Rust is an amazing super-power.
Most system/application level things is not going to need async IO. Your REST app is going to be perfectly fine with a threadpool. Even when you do need async, you probably want to use it in a relatively small part of your software (network), while doing most of the things in threads, using channels to pass work around between async/blocking IO parts (aka hybrid model).
Rust community just mindlessly over-did using async literally everywhere, to the point where the blocking IO Rust (the actually better UX one) became a second class citizen in the ecosystem.
Especially visible with web frameworks where there is N well designed async web frameworks (Axum, Wrap, etc.) and if you want a blocking one you get: