io_uring reduces the overhead of system calls - but it doesn't do anything to reduce the overhead of the actual networking stack.

If your send/receive calls spend most CPU time in going through routing/fragmentation/filter/BPF/etc path in the networking stack, then uring (or other APIs which just reduce the system call overhead, like SendMmsg/Recvmmsg for UDP) might only make a small difference. Source: Lots of profiling while implementing QUIC libraries.

An alternative to DPDK that allows to bypass the kernel networking stack would be AF_XDP.