[yazaddaruvala]

I work at a company where I do routinely need to handle C10K problems.

I also routinely interview candidates that want to work at my company. We typically downlevel or turn away candidates who do not have experience solving C10K problems (unless they can appropriately fake that experience).

Even though you may not need to solve C10K problems, (like in any education) it is typically very useful for engineers to think about and attempt solving artificial C10K problems to better educate themselves for when they need to solve those problems.

Meanwhile, if you're the CTO of a company and truly know your business will not require C10K ever in its life, and you know this is the wrong time to educate yourself and your employees, then yes you're correct that async is the wrong abstraction for you right now. Frankly in that case I'd argue Rust may also be the wrong abstraction for right now.