On the one hand, it's really annoying when your client library doesn't actually support asyncio compatible code (ex libraries which perform synchronous network or disk reads/writes), and you have to wrap everything in an executor.
On the other hand, making it explicit ensures I'm actually doing things async. "Leaf" functions with an async containing no await is now a red flag to me.
It's a mental tax to remember that I may actually be returning a future instead of the result of a future (similar to how you can return a function but not the result of that function being executed, or a non materialized generator), and having to call 'await x' instead of just assigning x kind of violates 'do what I mean'. In the end, async is (relatively) difficult, so I appreciate the enforced explicitness.