Awaiting allows you to efficiently yield the thread to other tasks instead of blocking it. That's one of its biggest advantages.
Did you know you can get even more performance if you manually manage memory and don’t use virtual functions?
The computational cost of context-switching threads at yield points is often many times higher than the actual workload executed between yield points. To address this you either need fewer yield points, which reduces concurrency, or you need to greatly reduce the cost of yielding. An async architecture reduces the cost of yielding by multiple orders of magnitude relative to threads.
I would they this often is 1% of cases. As for Rust ecosystem, it doesn't make much case to add so much complexity and inconvenient abstractions to cover 1% of use-cases.