BTW I think some anti-Rust people are more annoying than the worst Rust evangelists - seen some of them calling people not using Rust as "murderers", because "memory leakage can kill at the right time" - but that's due to them being evangelists to right-wing politics.
Most of the time, async tutorial makes you learn tokio, not async. If your program can run with only tokio::main, then you learned async. If not, you learnt tokio (except if you are spawning a future that should never stop)
For example, my pet project only uses tokio::main to do async stuff. The only instances of tokio::spawn is make sure some SQLite transactions get polled to completion. I do need to replace them with a proper mechanism now that sqlx supports smol-rs