When I read this, I have to think of a take I heard a few times, namely that "Rust would be better off if the language had opted for a proper effect system from the get go, instead of grafting specialized forms of it onto the language now."

Does anyone have some thoughts on this? I just lack the knowledge to really evaluate that sort of take. There's a lot of discussions on whether async Rust is "good" or "bad", or the right abstraction or not, but it's pretty clear that (at this point) we're more less stuck with it (for better or worse), but that's not what I am asking about.

What I am asking is whether a proper effect system would have genuinely, and legitimately improved or significantly simplified the whole state of Rust async or not, and how. A lot of the async Rust problems sound like "hard" problems, and I'm a bit skeptical that a feature like that would really reduce the "heavy lifting" you have to do.