The author's focus on async leads them to the wrong conclusion. Not adopting async would not have solved the fundamental underlying problem; the perennial issues with error handling in Rust are another manifestation of the same problem, and as soon as people start trying to do things like database transaction management they'll hit the same problem again. Ripping async out of Rust isn't a solution; this problem will come up again and again unless and until Rust implements proper first-class functions.