> The rust ecosystem is very invested into making every library that touches the network async.
Right, and that is one of the absolute worst things about the Rust ecosystem. Most programs don't benefit from async, and should use plain old threads because they are much easier to work with.
There is a very reasonable argument that an entire language feature shouldn't be oriented towards making high-complexity state machines easy to write, since they're relatively rare in production. But speakingly purely selfishly, I'm happy I can write something like cargo-nextest using async Rust in a bug-free manner.