I don't fully understand the sync_to_async() operation here. So the underlying database is not async, then is Django just tossing the sync DB call onto a thread or something?
Basically every function call that does db-queries needs an "a"-prefixed version. aget(), acreate(), aget_or_create(), acount(), aexists(), aiterator(), __aiter__, etc. And in future versions they'll work on the lower level, undocumented api, like _afetch_all(), aprefetch_related_objects(), compiler.aexecute_sql(), etc.
Eventually you'll probably need to switch database drivers to something that actually supports async.
entries = Entry.objects.filter(
category="python"
).order_by("-created")[:10]
{% for entry in entries %}...
Async template rendering becomes necessary if you want the templates to be able to execute async SQL queries in this way.
Jinja has this feature already with the enable_async=True setting - I wrote a tiny bit about that in https://til.simonwillison.net/sqlite/related-content