Sure you can. An `async` function in Javascript is essentially a completely normal function that returns a promise. The `async`/`await` syntax is a convenient syntax sugar for working with promises, but the issue would still exist if it didn't exist.
More to the point, the issue would still exist even if promises didn't exist — a lot of Node APIs originally used callbacks and a continuation-passing style approach to concurrency, and that had exactly the same issues.
Other commenters have already provided examples for other languages, and it's the same for Rust: async functions are just regular functions that return an impl Future type. As a sync function, you can call a bunch of async functions and return the futures to your caller to handle, or you can block your current thread with the block_on function typically available through a handle (similar to the Io object here) provided by your favorite async runtime [0].
In other words, you don't need such an Io object upfront: You need it when you want to actually drive its execution and get the result. From this perspective, the Zig approach is actually less flexible than Rust.
If you have a sync/non-IO function that now needs to do IO, it becomes async/IO. And since IO and async are viral, it's callers must also now be IO/async and call it with IO/await. All the way up the call stack.
You can't pass around "async/await" as a value attached to another object. You can do that with the IO param. That is very different.