I've used asyncio.create_task forever, and I've admittedly never read its documentation in depth. However, I've ALWAYS assigned the return value of create_task

I've used asyncio.create_task forever, and I've admittedly never read its documentation in depth. However, I've ALWAYS assigned the return value of create_task to some variable. To me this is just a good programming practice. The OP says "tasks are not like threads - that you can just launch and forget" - no! Even a thread should not simply be launched and forgotten! You always need a reference to it, so when your application is terminated you can join all the threads that are still running and things can exit in a clean way! Same goes for the tasks: when your application exits, it's just a good practice to stop the even loop and cancel any pending tasks. And, in general, one should always keep in mind the reference count rule in Python (the author incorrectly calls it "garbage collection" btw): if something you created in your function isn't referenced/assigned to anything, then its reference count will be zero, and it will be removed when the function stack unwinds. This is totally expected behaviour to me.