>most people who actually needed to do lots of io concurrently had their own workarounds (forking, etc) and people who didn't actually need it had found out how to get by without it (multiprocessing etc).

The problem is not python, it's a skill issue.

First of all forking is not a workaround, it's the way multiprocessing works at the low level in Unix systems.

Second of all, forking is multiprocessing, not multithreading.

Third of all, there's the standard threading library which just works well. There's no issue here, you don't need async.