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.
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.