So on the title, I picked this because it's simply the truth. Since async landed in 2019 or so, not much has changed.
Yes, we can have async in traits and closures now. But those are updates to the typesystem, not to the async machinery itself. Wakers are a little bit easier to work with, but that's an update to std/core.
As I understand it, the people who landed async Rust were quite burnt out and got less active and no one has picked up the torch. (Though there's 1 PR open from some google folk that will optimize how captured variables are laid out in memory, which is really nice to have) Since I and the people I work with are heavy async users, I think it's maybe up to me to do it or at least start it. Free as in puppy I guess.
So yeah, the title is a little baitey, but I do stand behind it.
I think it's partially accurate, and partially a consequence of how async fractures the design space, so it will always feel like a somewhat separate thing, or at least until we figure out how to make APIs agnostic to async-ness.
Some of the burnout no doubt being due to the catastrophizing of every decision by the community and the extreme rhetoric used across the board.
Great to see people wanting to get involved with the project, though. That’s the beauty of open source: if it aggravates you, you can fix it.