I agree that there's plenty of footguns with async python, but I think the hype is a bit overblown. A few sensible defaults in the standard library would go a long way, e.g. requiring a maxsize argument to Queue (or None if you really need it to be unbounded). The "accidental blocking" thing seems like less of design issue - it has much more to do with python's super long history as a sync-first language. Taking a step back, though, async is popular because it is genuinely extremely useful! If you need to do a bunch of work and that work is mostly IO-bound, then it makes sense to live in an async world.