I appreciate what the writer was attempting to say about the "one true runtime". The ecosystem has coalesced around tokio and it's here to stay. I personally like Tokio a lot.

That being said, critiquing a thread based vs async (green-thread) approach especially when it comes to usability is splitting hairs imo. Sure, you no longer have to use the await keyword, but it's just a keyword. There is the reduction of the threadpool scheduler for the async runtime, but that works pretty well and is not exposed to most users. And rationalizing about a thread based approach vs a async approach is just as hard. It's the nature of multithreaded programming.

> Sure, you no longer have to use the await keyword, but it's just a keyword.

It is not. It splits ecosystem and you can't easily mix sync and async libraries. We need green threads at language level to fix that.

The color of functions extends beyond the use of "await". I was just speaking about the ergonomics of the keyword "await".