This was not my experience. I had a working program that used the reqwest crate for a very basic synchronous-is-fine "just give me the contents of this web page" function. When I tried upgrading it to a newer reqwest that had decided async was the way to go, I found that that nice easy to use synchronous function had simply disappeared entirely, and I seemed to have to figure out async in order to use the library now. Luckily it was only a toy project so I just left it at the older version of the library. But as my first exposure to "async" as a rust feature it was a pretty off-putting one.