[makmanalp]

Sorry - I wasn't clear enough. Who says it's one single relational database? And besides, like I mention, it's often not relational database queries but a service calls (think microservice architectures, for example). Or both!

Anyway, I respect your position that yes, for the average user, throwing a bunch of "async" in there isn't going to make their code faster, and it's just cargo cult programming. And yes, there is some tradeoff curve where sometimes, for a small benefit, it's not worth the effort to worry about it, as with all things. But it's just a tough sell to argue that no one should need this :-)

More and more often today, the backend serves as glue between frontend clients and a horde of services / data systems. This is often an I/O heavy workload (wait while I make a request, wait for a response, wait while I download x10). This kind of workload is ripe for speeding up with async. That's all I'm saying!