> Even the simple, Unix-esque atomic programs can’t help but do two or three things at once. Okay, now you set it up so, instead of waiting on read or accept or whatnot, you register your file descriptors into poll and wait on that, then switching on the result of poll to figure out what you actually want to do.

> Eventually, two or three sockets becomes a hundred, or even an unlimited amount. Guess it’s time to bring in epoll! Or, if you want to be cross-platform, it’s now time to write a wrapper around that, kqueue and, if you’re brave, IOCP.

This feels like a straw man. Nobody is saying "don't use async; use epoll!". The alternative to async is traditional OS threads. This option is weirdly not mentioned in the article at all.

And yes they have a reputation for being very hard - and they can be - but Rust makes traditional multithreading MUCH easier than in C++. And I would argue that Rust's async is equally hard.

Rust makes traditional threading way easier than other languages, and traditional async way harder than other languages, enough that threads are arguably simpler.