Because rust is a systems language, it is common for people to use it for things that don't involve http or even networking in general. Alternatively, people often use it for wasm. Before async and specifically tokio, a much larger percentage of crates were usable by those people. This feels like something nice has been taken away or that our use case has been marginalized. The answer is to spend the time to create tokio and/or async free alternatives to these crates, but that was not expected to be necessary, so it also is added work. All of that is irritating, and the constant stream of "just accept it and get with the program. Stop complaining!" Is really quite infuriating. The fair answer is that rust should be what the majority of its users want/need it to be. But people who just need a back end language have a dozen or more good ones to choose from. People who need a systems language have far fewer choices, especially if you want memory safety, so having the aims of the language diverted from that end is irritating to say the least. I do suspect a fork to occur someday for those reasons, probably centered around the use in linux android or windows.