Yeah, Scala doesn't have async/await but you have the same basic issue where if you have one async function (something that returns a Future/IO/Task/etc) then every caller has to also be async (or block on the result and potentially cause all manner of mayhem).

I think it's generally less of a problem in Scala though because most libraries/frameworks etc are async by default which makes sense. It's much easier to take a sync effect and fit it into an async process (just wrap the result in Future.successful/IO.pure/etc) than it is to fit an async call into a sync process (you can always do Await.result/IO.unsafeRunSync but it can have some very perverse effects on runtime behavior).