[tatterdemalion]

What's missing here is that Go has a userspace scheduler and greenthreads. Despite presenting the user with something that looks like old school blocking IO, because you are only blocking a greenthread it is actually asynchronous IO under the hood.

And of course there is a huge amount of abstraction to build this up. It's just all hidden in the language runtime, so people can say with a straight face that there is "no abstraction and no cruft."