BTW I think some anti-Rust people are more annoying than the worst Rust evangelists - seen some of them calling people not using Rust as "murderers", because "memory leakage can kill at the right time" - but that's due to them being evangelists to right-wing politics.
I've done quite a bit of async programming and I can't quite figure out what people are complaining about here. Best I can tell, they just don't understand what async functions actually are.
Most of the time, async tutorial makes you learn tokio, not async. If your program can run with only tokio::main, then you learned async. If not, you learnt tokio (except if you are spawning a future that should never stop)
For example, my pet project only uses tokio::main to do async stuff. The only instances of tokio::spawn is make sure some SQLite transactions get polled to completion. I do need to replace them with a proper mechanism now that sqlx supports smol-rs