I said nothing about "stand-alone" services. I'm all about using the right solution to the problem. We run on Kubernetes and have access to message queues. But if all I want to do is make a couple of HTTP calls concurrently, I don't think I should have to manage a thread/process pool to do so, or lean on a message queue or redis based RPC mechanism. In an async context I can do this with a single line of code.

Every rich client-side experience in your browser is written using async code in Javascript or Typescript, as is every electron app. Every developer at my company is comfortable with this pattern, and frameworks like FastAPI make this a similarly smooth experience when using Python.

If async was a solution in search of a problem, it wouldn't have been stolen from C# and added to Rust, Python, Kotlin, etc. The engineering effort required to bring this solution to all these languages is immense, so I'm clearly not the only person seeing value in it.