Indeed, it's surprising that someone is building today a framework in Python that is not async, when it's pretty easy to do so (compared to eg. the twisted days, but even to pre3.6 days).
That's an odd assertion. What kind of things do you think most projects do? I'd say most projects have network IO happening (querying databases, storing data to e.g. S3, communicating with other web services), in which case async absolutely is helpful and far more performant.
In the second URL, most async frameworks can deliver around 10x the number of http request for endpoints doing 20 sql queries to pg (15000 vs 1500 for flask/django...).
Note that this thread is a discussion of a new web framework — one that will definitely do network requests, and likely to do db requests (over a network or a local socket, but I/O bound regardless).