Event Loops are an old technique and not a hype. I am aware of that. One of my earliest C experiments as a kid was writing a snake-implementation for the terminal. I still have that code, and it uses an event loop to process the input.
The hype I am talking about, is an assertion currently "en vogue", that asynchronous should be the default method of doing concurrency.
This hype, imho, started with the ubiquitous use of JS as a backend implementation language. JS couldn't work another way, so this is what all these JS programmers used, and JS is super popular. So, it must be cool and great. And that's how a workaround for a language limitation became a popular paradigm.
So, no it is not a hype. These types of techniques have been used for a very long time.