While admittedly async is a bit of a jungle for newcomers, I am glad that it is not built into the standard library. Where you see a bunch of needlessly competing runtimes, I see a healthy variety of different packages tailored to different users and technical specializations: tokio - reasonable default and server applications; smol - desktop applications or those who prefer the simplicity; embassy - embedded applications; futures crate - runtime agnostic utilities. I will gladly reach for any one of these depending on the kind of application I am developing.
