I keep looking at the original project and the last discussion is basically them saying it's not feasible. So I guess I just never bothered looking for other crates.
That repo has relatively few contributors, is still <1.0, and if it was easy enough to ship an extension, why wasn't it included in the main repo? Surely it would be nicer to enable an "async" feature instead of have a separate crate, no? Or at least have it sit next to the sync crate?
I think that explains why people either don't know about it or dismissed it.