My hope is that by raising these things on HN, someone will take notice in a different way and at least start considering / revisiting alternatives
This is a serious wart on language design and while I can agree that it's likely too late to fix it for Rust, there is a kind of race among new languages to be a successor to C++ in many of the domains C++ is used in, and while I think Rust does hold a lead in that race, the race is not over.
A language that can provide an ergonomic solution to concurrency would absolutely provide a huge boost to any such language, and so to people in that space, listen to these complaints. Async/await is not a good solution to this problem.
You almost always hear people complaining about async/await in every language it's a part of but you rarely hear people complain about how Go manages concurrency.