Sorry to spoil your axe-grinding with hard data, but the Rust async ecosystem has exploded since 2019. It is now about 5-6 times larger than it was before async/await landing:

https://lib.rs/crates/tokio/rev

And Rust as a whole keeps growing exponentially:

https://lib.rs/stats

That's not what I was talking about. Before async we had one ecosystem. Now we have at last three: non-async, Tokio, async-std

My point is, the ecosystem experience has degraded since the async MVP is stabel.

You're conflating programming models with async runtimes, and weirdly attributing them to stabilization of a syntax sugar.

The split between blocking and non-blocking code existed in Rust before stabilization of async/await (e.g. futures 0.1 existed 3 years before, and mio is older than even Rust 1.0).

The only new thing is async-std, but that's not a stabilized part of Rust. It's just a 3rd party library. It may have been written anyway. It's relatively niche (1/10th of tokio), and you can safely ignore its existence (as far as I can tell every async-std-based crate supports tokio too, or has a direct tokio equivalent.)

I was worried that switch from futures 0.1 to std::future would fragment the ecosystem, but fortunately the whole ecosystem moved quickly, and the switch is completely over now.

I think your comment hits the bullseye better than many others I've seen around this. It very much looks like the language stopped progressing with async.

Seems like they just tried to be everything at once, and reached some sort of a critical mass. It probably didn't help how Mozilla dropped lots of their Rust projects and staff at roughly the same time.

It's still a very good C++ replacement. I think its role as a higher level application language is more of an open question.