The syntax isn't the problem. The syntax is fine: I've never had a serious problem with Rust's async syntax, and the language has been and continues to remove the papercuts that have emerged since async appeared.

The thing about async Rust that absolutely destroys my efforts with it is the legion of problems involving dependencies and their async runtime peculiarities.

As a result I've had to set Rust aside for most things where I'd otherwise love to employ it. I can't risk losing days to some tangle of an async runtime compatibility snafu. The one area that Rust has really astonished me recently is embedded Rust and MCUs: the ecosystem there is still young, but the results that can be produced with Rust in embedded development are really astonishing.

Of course, there is typically no async runtime involved at that level, so problem solved...