My read of that paragraph was that they meant existing asynchronous programs can be simplified, due to the need for less workarounds for the Linux I/O layer (e.

My read of that paragraph was that they meant existing asynchronous programs can be simplified, due to the need for less workarounds for the Linux I/O layer (e.g. thread pools to make disk operations appear asynchronous are no longer necessary.) And I agree with that; asynchronous I/O had a lot of pitfalls on Linux until io_uring came around, making things much worse than strictly necessary. In general I totally agree that a synchronous program will be way simpler than an equivalent asynchronous one, though.