You need an async runtime to run async code yes, and Rust's isn't built in. Why does that matter though? Rust has a decent package manager; add the dependency and move on.

Why are you trying to avoid Tokio lol, tokio is the defacto async runtime in rust, saying you're trying to avoid it is like saying you're trying to avoid async while writing async, somehow people act like if they merged tokio into std and instead of #[tokio::main] or whatever you had to do #[async::main] it would somehow be better.

Once you stop fighting the fact that tokio = async rust for 99% of cases, things are quite smooth.

Tokio simply doesn't meet the ise case of some people doing wasm, and many people doing embedded. That isn't a huge deal, just don't use it right? Except many otherwise usable crates seem to adopt tokio unnecessarily.

Your "lol" is entirely inappropriate.

If Tokio was the final answer, https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio-uring/ wouldn't exist.